Full text of "Black Lamb And Grey Falcon Vol-i"

See other formats

DELHI UNIVERSITY
LIBRARY

l&LHl UNIVERSITY LIBRARY

ci.No. u S q'Z.S N 3 l

Ac No. 2, O 7 Dtte of release for loan

This book should be returned on or before the date last ataoped
below. An overdue charse of one anna will be levied for eadi day
the book is kept beyond that date.

OTHER BOOHS BY REBECCA WEST

Noveh

The Return of the Soldier
The Judge
Harriet Hume
The Thinking Reed

Short Stories

The Harsh Voice

Biography

St. Augustine

Criticism

Henry James

The Strange Necessity

In Collaboration with Losu
Lions and I ambs
The Rake’s Progress

rHJNTKlJ JN GHtAT PHITAIN

MY FRIENDS IN YUGOSI.AVIA

WHO ARE NOW ALL DEAD OR ENSLAVED

Kai Tm iroOtLv^v irarpiSa irapd<r)^v awols,
IlopaOcuTOV froAiv iroiMV froAtras a^oik^.

Grant to them the Fatherland of their desire,
and make them again citizens of Paradise.

J'cxigc un vrai bnnheur, un vrai amour, une vraie contr6e oil Ic soleil alteme
avec la lunc, oil Ics saisons se deroulent en ordre, oil de vrais arbres portent
de vrais fruits, oil de vrais poissons habitent les rivieres, et de vrais oiseaux le
del, oil la vraie neige dccouvre de vraies fleurs, oil tout sort est vrai, vrai,
vi’ritablc. J'en ai assez de cette lumiire mome, de ces campagnes stiriles,
sans jour, sans nuit, oil ne survivent que les betes fdroces et rapaces, oil les
lois de la nature ne fonctionnent plus.

Jean Cocteau, Les Chevaliers de la Table Ronde

FLur.T.bEN ! I think it is in Macedon where Alexander is pom. I tell you,
captain, if you look in the maps of the ’orld, I warrant you sail find, in the
comparisons between Macedon and Monmouth, that the situations, look you,
is both alike. There is a river in Macedon; and there is also, moreover, a
river at Monmouth ; It is called Wye at Monmouth ; but it is out of my
prains what is the name of the other river ; but 'tis all one, ’tis alike as my
fingers is to my fingers, and there is salmons in both.

Shakespeare, King Henry the Fifth

NOTE ON PRONUNCIATION

The spelling of Yugoslavian names presents a serious problem. The Serbo-
Croat language is spoken in all parts of Yugoslavia described in this book ;
but to write it the Serbs use the Cyrillic alphabet (which is much the same
as the Russian, but simpler) and the Croats use the Latin alphabet. Most
foreign writers on Yugoslavia follow the Croatian spelling, but this is not
satisfactory. The Cyrillic alphabet is designed to give a perfect phonetic
rendering of the Slav group of languages, and provides characters for several
consonants which other groups lack. The Latin alphabet can only represent
these consonants by clapping accents on other consonants which bear some
resemblance to them ; and the Croatian usage still further confuses the
English eye by using " c " to represent not " s ” and " k " but " ts ”, and
" j ” for “ y ”. 1 have found that in practice the casual English reader is
baffled by this unfamiliar use of what looks familiar and is apt to pass over
names without grasping them clearly. I have therefore done my best to
transliterate all Yugoslavian names into forms most likely to convey the
sound of them to English eats. Cetinje is written here as Tsetinye, jajee as
Yaitse, Pe5 as Fetch, Sestine as Sbestinc. Kosovo I have written Kossovo,
though the Serbo-Croat language uses no double consonants, because we
take them as a sign that the preceding vowel is short.

This is a rough-and-ready method, and at certain points it has broken
down. The Cyrillic alphabet provides special characters for representing
liquid consonants ; the Latin alphabet can only indicate these by adding
“ j ” to the consonant, and this is extremely confusing at the end of a word.
In pronouncing “ Senj " the speaker says " Sen ”, then starts to say a " y ”
sound, arid stops half way. The English reader, seeing “ Senj ”, pronounces
it “ Senge ” to rhyme with “ Penge ”. But the spelling " Seny ” makes him
pronounce it as a dissyllable ; and if the suggestion of the Royal Geographical
Society is adopted and the word is spelled " Sen’ ”, he is apt for some strange
reason to interpret this sign as a Scotch " ch ”. I have therefore regarded
the problem as insoluble, and have left such words spelt in the Croatian
fashion, with the hope that readers will take the presence of the letter “ j ” as
warning that there are dark phonetic doings afoot. In " Bitolj ”, I may add,
the " 1 ” has almost entirely disappeared, having only a short “ y " sound.

I have also given up any attempt to transliterate “ Sarajevo ” or
“ Skoplje ”. For one thing “ Sarajevo ” is a tragically familiar form ; and
for another, it is not a pure Slav word, and has the Turkish word “ sarai ”, a
fortress, embedded in it, with a result hardly to be conveyed by any but a
most uncouth spelling. It is pronounced something like “ Sa-rai-ye-vo ”
with a faint accent on the second syllable, and a short “ e ”. As for

vii

viii BI.ACK LAMB AND GREY FALCON

“ Skoplje ", the one way one must not pronounce it is the way the English
reader will certainly pronounce it if it is spelt “ Skoplye The “ o ” is
short, and all the letters after it are combined into a single sound. I have
committed another irregularity by putting an “ c ” into the word " Tsrna ”,
so often found in place-names. This makes it easier for the English reader
to grasp that the vowel sound in the rolled " r ” comes before it and not after.

R. W.

CONTENTS

PAG!

PROLOGUE I

JOURNEY 26

CROATIA 39

DALMATIA 115

HERZEGOVINA 277

BOSNIA .... . , 300

458

SERBIA

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

FACING PAGB

Death of Alexander Karageorgevitch, King of Yugo-

slavia, Marseilles, qth October 1934 . . .18

E.N.A.

Market-place at Zagreb ..... 19

E.N.A.

The Walls of Rab ...... 130

Photo; Putnik

The Cathedral at Rab ...... 131

Pox Photos t Ltd.

The Peristyle of Diocletian’s Palace . . . 146

Split from Mount Marian ..... 147

Keystone Press Agency

The Golden Door of Diocletian’s Palace . . 186

Fox Photos, Ltd.

Marmont’s Belvedere at Trogir .... 187

A Dalmatian Doorway . . . . . .212

Korchula ........ 213

Dubrovnik : the Fountain of Onofrio de la Cava and
Church of St. Saviour .....
Topical Press Agency

Dubrovnik .......

Keystone Press Agency

Costume of Mostar ......

The Archduke Franz Ferdinand and Sophie Chotek
PROBABLY leaving THE HoTEL BoSNA, AT IlIDZHE TO

drive TO THE TOWN HaLL, SARAJEVO, 28TH JuNE 1914 .
E.N.A.

240

241
300

301

The Mithraic Altar at Yaitse .... 418
Monastery in the Frushka Gora . . , .419

PROLOGUE

fen

I RAISED myself on my elbow and called through the open
door into the other wagon-lit :

“ My dear, I know I have inconvenienced you terribly
by making you take your holiday now, and I know you did not
really want to come to Yugoslavia at all. But when you get
there you will see why it was so important that we should make
this journey, and that we should make it now, at Easter. It will
all be quite clear, once we are in Yugoslavia.”

There was, however, no reply. My husband had gone to
sleep. It was perhaps as well. I could not have gone on to
justify my certainty that this train was taking us to a land where
everything was comprehensible, where the mode of life was so
honest that it put an end to perplexity. I lay back in the dark-
ness and marvelled that I should be feeling about Yugoslavia as
if it were my mother country, for this was 1937, and I had never
seen the place till 1936. Indeed, I could remember the first time
I ever spoke the name " Yugoslavia ” and that was only two and
a half years before, on October the ninth, 1934.

It was in a London nursing-home. I had had an operation,
in the new miraculous way. One morning a nurse had come in
and given me an injection, as gently as might be, and had made
a little joke which was not very good but served its purpose of
taking the chill off the difficult moment. Then I picked up my
book and read that sonnet by Joachim du Bellay which begins
" Heureux qui, comme Ulysse, a fait un beau voyage ”. I said
to myself, ” That is one of the most beautiful poems in the world,”
and I rolled over in my bed, still thinking that it was one of the
most beautiful poems in the world, and found that the electric
light was burning and there was a new nurse standing at the end

s BLACK LAMB AND GREY FALCON

of my bed. Twelve hours had passed in that moment. They
had taken me upstairs to a room far above the roofs of London,
and had cut me about for three hours and a half, and had brought
me down again, and now I was merely sleepy, and not at all
sick, and still half-rooted in my pleasure in the poem, still listen-
ing to a voice speaking through the ages, with barest economy
that somehow is the most lavish melody : “ Et en quelle saison
Revoiray-je le clos de ma pauvre maison, Qui m’est une province
et beaucoup tl’avantage ? *’

I had been told beforehand that it would all be quite easy ;
but before an operation the unconscious, which is really a shock-
ing old fool, envisages surgery as it was in the Stone Age, and
I had been very much afraid. 1 rebuked myself for not having
observed that the universe was becoming beneficent at a great
rate. But it was not yet wholly so. My operation wound left
me an illusion that I had a load of ice strapped to my body. So,
to distract me, I had a radio brought into my room, and for the
first time I realised how uninteresting life could be and how
perverse human appetite. After I had listened to some talks
and variety programmes, I would not have been surprised to
hear that there are householders who make arrangements with
the local authorities not to empty their dustbins but to fill them.
Nevertheless there was always good music provided by some
station or other at any time in the day, and I learned to swing
like a trapeze artist from programme to programme in search of it.

But one evening I turned the wrong knob and found music
of a kind other than I sought, the music that is above earth, that
lives in the thunderclouds and rolls in human ears and some-
times deafens them without betraying the path of its melodic
line. I heard the announcer relate how the King of Yugoslavia
had been assassinated in the streets of Marseilles that morning.
We had passed into another phase of the mystery we are enacting
here on earth, and I knew that it might be agonising. The rags
and tags of knowledge that we all have about us told me what
foreign power had done this thing. It appeared to me inevitable
that war must follow, and indeed it must have done, had not the
Yugoslavian Government exercised an iron control on its popula-
tion, then and thereafter, and abstained from the smallest pro-
vocative action against its enemies. That forbearance, which is
one of the most extraordinary feats of statesmanship performed
in post-war Europe, I could not be expected to foresee. So I

PROLOGUE

imagined myself widowed and childless, which was another in-
stance of the archaic outlook of the unconscious, for I knew that
in the next war we women would have scarcely any need to fear
bereavement, since air raids unpreceded by declaration of war
would send us and our loved ones to the next world in the breach-
less unity of scrambled eggs. That thought did not then occur
to me, so I rang for my nurse, and when she came I cried to her,
" Switch on the telephone ! I must speak to my husband at once.
A most teirible thing has happened. The King of Yugoslavia
has been assassinated.” “ Oh, dear 1 ” she replied. " Did you
know him ? ” " No,” I said. “ Then why,” she asked, “ do
you think it's so terrible ? ”

Her question made me remember that the word “ idiot ”
comes from a Greek root meaning private person. Idiocy is the
female defect : intent on their private lives, women follow their
fate through a darkness deep as that cast by malformed cells in
the brain. It is no worse than the male defect, which is lunacy ;
they are so obsessed by public affairs that they see the world as
by moonlight, which shows the outlines of every object but not
the details indicative of their nature. I said, ” Well, you know,
assassinations lead to other things I ” ” Do they ? ” she asked.
” Do they not 1 ” I sighed, for when I came to look back on it
my life had been punctuated by the slaughter of royalties, by the
shouting of newsboys who have run down the streets to tell me
that someone has used a lethal weapon to turn over a new leaf in
the book of history. I remember when I was five years old look-
ing upward at my mother and her cousin, who were standing
side by side and looking down at a newspaper laid on a table in
a circle of gaslight, the folds in their white pouched blouses and
long black skirts kept as still by their consternation as if they
were carved in stone. “ There was the Empress Elizabeth of
Austria," I said to the nurse, thirty-six years later. " She was
very beautiful, wasn't she ? ” she asked. " One of the most
beautiful women who ever lived,” I said. " But wasn’t she
mad ? ” she asked. " Perhaps," I said, " perhaps, but only a
little, and at the end. She was certainly brilliantly clever. Before
she was thirty she had given proof of greatness.” “.How ? ” she
asked. To her increasing distress I told her, for I know quite a
lot of Hapsburg history, imtil I saw how bored she was and let
her go and leave me in darkness that was now patterned by the
lovely triangle of Elizabeth’s face.

4 BLACK LAMB AND GREY FALCON

How great she was J In her earJy pictures she wears the
same look of fiery sullenness we see in the young Napoleon :
she knows that within her there is a spring of life and she is
afraid that the world will not let it flow forth and do its fructifying
work. In her later pictures she wears a look that was never on
the face of Napoleon. The world had not let the spring flow
forth and it had turned to bitterness. But she was not without
achievements of the finest sort, of a sort, indeed, that Napoleon
never equalled. When she was sixteen she came, a Wittelsbach
from the country bumpkin court of Munich, to marry the young
Emperor of Austria and be the governing prisoner of the court
of Vienna, which was the court of courts since the French Revolu-
tion had annulled the Tuileries and Versailles. The change
would have made many women into nothing. But five years
later she made a tour of Lombardy and Venetia at Franz Josefs
side which was in many ways a miracle. It was, in the first
place, a miracle of courage, because he and his officials had
made these provinces loathe them for their brutality and in-
efficiency. The yoimg girl sat with unbowed head in theatres
that became silent as the grave at her coming, that were black
with mourning worn to insult her, and she walked unperturbed
through streets that emptied before her as if she were the plague.
But when she came face to face with any Italians there occurred
to her always the right word and gesture by which she uncovered
her nature and pled : “ Look, I am the Empress, but I am not
evil. Forgive me and my husband and Austria for the evil we
have done you, and let us love one another and work for peace
between us.”

It was useless, of course. Her successes were immediately
annulled by the arrests and floggings carried out by the Haps-
burg officials. It was inevitable that the two provinces should
be absorbed in the new kingdom of Italy. But Elizabeth’s
sweetness had not been merely automatic, she had been thinking
like a Liberal and like an Empress. She knew there was a real
link betw'een Austria and Hungary, and that it was being strained
by misgovernment. So the next year she made a journey
through Hungary, which was also a matter of courage, for it
was almost as gravely disaffected as Lombardy and Venetia, and
afterwards she learned Hungarian, though it is one of the most
difficult of languages, cultivated the friendship of many import-
ant Hungarians, and acquainted herself with the nature of the

PROLOGUE

concessions desired by Hungary. Her plans fell into abeyance
when she parted from Franz Josef and travelled for five years.
But in 1866 Austria was defeated by the Prussians, and she came
back to console her husband, and then she induced him to create
the Dual Monarchy and give autonomy to Hungary. It was by
this device alone that the Austro-Hungarian Empire was able to
survive into the twentieth century, and both the idea and the
driving force behind the execution belonged to Elizabeth. That
was statesmanship. Nothing of Napoleon’s making lasted so
long, nor was made so nobly.

Elizabeth should have gone on and medicined some of the
other sores that were poisoning the Empire. She should have
solved the problem, of the Slav populations under Hapsburg rule.
The Slavs were a people, quarrelsome, courageous, artistic, intel-
lectual and profoundly perplexing to all other peoples, who came
from Asia into the Balkan Peninsula early in the Christian era
and were christianised by Byzantine influence. Thereafter they
founded violent and magnificent kingdoms of infinite promise in
Bulgaria, Serbia and Bosnia, but these were overthrown when
the Turks invaded Europe in the fourteenth century, and all
were enslaved except the Slavs on the western borders of the
Peninsula. These lived under the wing of the great powers, of
Venice and Austria and Hungary, which was a doubtful privilege,
since they were used as helots and as man-power to be spent
without thrift against the Turks. Now all of these were under
the Austro-Hungarian Empire, the Czechs and the Croats, and
the Slovenes and the Slovaks and the Dalmatians ; and they
were alike treated oppressively, largely because the German-
Austrians felt a violent instinctive loathing of all Slavs and
particularly of the Czechs, whose great intelligence and ability
made them dangerous competitors in the labour market. More-
over, Serbia and Bulgaria had thrown off the Turkish yoke
during the nineteenth century and had established themselves as
free states, and the reactionary parties in Austria and Hungary
feared that if their Slav populations were given liberty they
would seek union with Serbia under Russian protection. There-
fore they harried the Slavs as much as they could, by all possible
economic and social penalties, and tried with especial venom to
destroy their languages, and created for themselves an increasing
amount of internal disorder which all sane men saw to carry a
threat of disruption. It might have saved the Empire altogether,

VOL. I B

6 BLACK LAMB AND GREY FALCON

it might have averted the war of 1914, if Elizabeth had dealt
with the Slavs as she dealt with the Hungarians. But after
thirty she did no more work for the Empire. "

Her work stopped because her marriage, which was the
medium for her work, ceased to be tolerable. It appears
probable, from the evidence we have, that Elizabeth could not
reconcile herself to a certain paradox which often appears in
the lives of very feminine women. She knew that certain
virtues are understood to be desirable in women : beauty,
tenderness, grace, house-pride, the power to bear and , rear
children. She believed that she possessed some of th^ virtues
and that her husband loved her for it. Indeed, he seemed to
have given definite proof that he loved her by marrying her
against the will of his mother, the Archduchess Sophie. And
she thought that because he loved her he must be her friend.
In that she was artless. Her husband like many other human
beings was divided between the love of life and the love of death.
His love of life made him love Elizabeth. His love of death
made him love his abominable mother, and give her an authority
over Elizabeth which she horribly misused.

The Archduchess Sophie is a figure of universal significance.
She was the kind of woman whom men respect for no other
reason than that she is lethal, whom a male committee will
appoint to the post of hospital matron. She had none of the
womanly virtues. Especially did she lack tenderness. There is
no record of her ever having said a gentle word to the girl of
sixteen whom her son brought home to endure this troublesome
greatness, and she arranged for the Archbishop who performed
their marriage ceremony to address an insulting homily to the
bride, bidding her remember that she was a nobody who had
been called to a great position, and try to do her best. In
politics she was practised in every kind of folly that most
affronted the girl's instinctive wisdom. She was always thrust-
ing the blunt muzzle of her stupidity into conclaves of state,
treading down intelligent debate as a beast treads down the
grass at a gate into mud, undermining the foundations of the
Empire by insisting that everybody possible should be opposed
and hurt. She was personally responsible for some very ugly
persecutions : one of her victims was the peasant philosophy
Konrad Deubly. She was also a great slut. She had done
nothing to reform the medievalism of the Austrian Palaces.

PROLOGUE

It was the middle of the nineteenth century when -Elizabeth
came to Vienna, but both at the Winter Palace and the Summer
Palace, at the Hofbui^ and Schonbrunn, was she expected to
perform her excretory functions at a commode behind a screen
in a passage which was patrolled by a sentry. The Archduchess
Sophie saw to it that the evil she did should live after her by
snatching Elizabeth’s children away from her and allowing her
no part in their upbringing. One little girl died in her care,
attended by a doctor whom Elizabeth thought old-fashioned and
incompetent ; and the unhappy character of the Crown Prince
Rudolf, restless, undisciplined, tactless and insatiable, bears
witness to her inability to look after their minds.

After Franz Josef had lost Elizabeth by putting this inferior
over her and proving that love is not necessarily kind, he showed
her endless kindness and indulgence, financing her wanderings
and her castle-buildings with great good temper and receiving
her gladly when she came home ; and it seems she had no ill-
feeling against him. She introduced the actress, Katherina
Schratt, into his life very much as a woman might put flowers
into a room she felt to be dreary. But she must have hated him
as the Hapsburg of Hapsburgs, the centre of the imbecile
system, when on January the thirtieth, 1889, Rudolf was found
dead in his shooting-box at MayCrling beside the body of a girl
of seventeen named Marie Vetsera. This event still remains a
mystery. Marie Vetsera had been his mistress for a year and it
is usually supposed that he and she had agreed to die together
because Franz Josef had demanded they should part. But this
is very hard to believe. Marie Vetsera was a very fat and plain
little girl, bouncing with a vulgar ardour stimulated by im-
proper French novels, which had already led her into an affair
with an English officer in Egypt ; and it seems unlikely that
Rudolf, who was a man of many love-affairs, should have thought
her of supreme value after a year’s possession, particularly con-
sidering that he had spent the night before he went to Mayerling
with an actress to whom he had long been attached. It would
seem much more probable that he had taken his life or (which is
possible if his farewell notes were forged) been murdered as a
result of troubles arising from his political opinions.

Of these we know a great deal, because he wrote a great
number of articles for anonymous publication in the Neues
Wiener Tageblatt and an even greater number of letters to its

g BLACK LAMB AND GREY FALCON

editor, a gifted Jew named Moritz Szeps. These show that he
was a fervent Liberal and loathed the Hapsburg system. He
loathed the expanding militarism of Germany, and prophesied
that a German alliance would mean the destruction of Austria,
body and soul ; and he revered France with its deeply rooted
culture and democratic tradition. He was enraged by anti-
Semitism and wrote one of his most forcible articles against a
gang of aristocrats who after a drunken orgy had gone round
the Ghetto of Prague smashing windows, and had been let off
scot-free by the police. He was scandalised by the corruption of
the banks and law-courts, and by the lack of integrity among
high officials and politicians, and most of all by the Austro-
Hungarian Empire. " As a simple onlooker,” he wrote, “ I am
curious to know how such an old and tough organism as the
Austrian Empire can last so long without cracking at the joints
and breaking into pieces.” Particularly was he eager to deal
with the Slav problem, which had now grown even more com-
plicated. Bosnia and Herzegovina had driven out the Turks
and had been cheated out of the freedom they had thus won by
the Treaty of Berlin, which had given the Austro-Hungarian
Empire the right to occupy and administer them. This had
enraged the Slavs and given Serbia a grievance, so it was held
by reactionaries to be all the more necessary to defend Austrian
and Hungarian privileges. Rudolf had shown what he felt early
in his career : when Franz Josef had appointed him colonel he
had chosen to be attached to a Czech regiment with middle-class
officers which was then stationed in Prague.

Whatever the explanation of Mayerling it must have raised
Elizabeth’s impatience with Vienna to loathing. The situation
was unmitigated waste and ruin. She had never achieved a
happy relationship with her son, although there was a strong
intellectual sympathy between them, because of the early alienat-
ing influence of the Archduchess Sophie, and the Hapsburgs had
spoiled what they had not let her save. Rudolf had been forced
for dynastic reasons into a marriage with a tedious Belgian
princess, an acidulated child with golden hair, small eyes and
the conservative opinions one would expect from a very old
member of the Carlton Club. She was literally a child ; at
the time of her wedding she had not yet shown the signs of
womanhood. Owing to a slip in the enormously complicated
domestic machinery of the Hapsburgs, she and her young bride-

PROLOGUE

groom, who was only twenty-two, had been sent for their honey-
moon to a remote castle which had been left servantless and
unprepared. This ill-begun marriage had gone from bad to
worse, and both husband and wife tortured and were tortured
in turn. But it was the Hapsburg situation, not merely the
specific wrongs the Hapsburgs brought on Rudolf, that were
his ruin. Chamberlains fussed, spies scribbled, the police bullied
and nagged, everybody knew where everybody else was at every
moment of the day, Franz Josef rose at four each morning and
worked on official papers for twelve or fourteen hours ; and not
a minute's thought was given to correcting the evils that were
undermining the foundations of the Empire. Rudolf, as any
intelligent member of the family must have done, tried to remedy
this. Either he made some too ambitious plan and was detected
and killed himself or was killed, of from discouragement he
soused himself with brandy till it seemed proper to die for a
plump little hoyden of seventeen. Now he lay dead, and the
Austro-Hungarian Empire was without a direct or satisfactory
heir.

Elizabeth lived nine years after her son’s death, as drearily
as any other of the unemployed. Then, perhaps as a punishment
for having turned her back on the Slav problem, the key to
Eastern Europe, a Western problem slew her. For the news-
paper my mother and her cousin spread in the gaslight was
wrong when it said that the man who killed her, Luccheni, was
a madman. It is true that he said that he had killed Elizabeth
because he had vowed to kill the first royal person he could find,
and that he had gone to Evian to stab the Duke of Orleans but
had missed him and had come back to Geneva to get Elizabeth
instead ; and this is an insane avowal, for no benefit whatsoever
could be derived by anybody from the death of either of these
people. But for all that Luccheni was not mad. Many people
are unable to say what they mean only because they have not
been given an adequate vocabulary by their environment ; and
their apparently meaningless remarks may be inspired by a
sane enough consciousness of real facts.

There is a phase of ancient history which ought never to be
forgotten by those who wish to understand their fellow-men.
In Africa during the fourth century a great many Christians
joined a body of schismatics known as the Donatists who were
wrecking the Church by maintaining that only sacraments

BLACK LAMB AND GREY FALCON

^ministered by a righteous priest were valid, and that a number
of contemporary priests had proved themselves unrighteous by
showing cowardice during the persecutions of Diocletian. They
raved : for according to the Church Christ is the real dispenser
of the sacraments, and it is inconceivable that a relationship
prescribed by Him could break down through the personality of
the mediator, and in many cases the tales were scandalmonger-
ing. But though these people raved they were not mad. They
were making the only noises they knew to express the misery
inflicted on them by the economic collapse of the Western Roman
Empire. Since there was no economic literature there was no
vocabulary suitable to their misery, so they had to use the vocabu-
lary given them by the Church ; and they screamed nonsense
about the sacraments because they very sensibly recognised that
the Western Roman Empire was going to die, and so were they.

It was so with Luccheni. He performed his meaningless act
out of his consciousness of what is perhaps the most real distress
of our age. He was an Italian born in Paris of parents forced to
emigrate by their poverty and trodden down into an alien
criminal class : that is to say, he belonged to an urban popula-
tion for which the existing forms of government made no pro-
vision, which wandered often workless and always traditionless,
without power to control its destiny. It was indeed most appro-
priate that he should register his discontent by killing Elizabeth,
for Vienna is the archetype of the great city which breeds such
a population. Its luxury was financed by an exploited peasant
class bled so white that it was ready to’ send its boys into the
factories and the girls into service on any terms. The beggars
in the streets of Vienna, who the innocent suppose were put
there by the Treaty of St. Germain, are descendants of an army as
old as the nineteenth century. Luccheni said with his stiletto to
the symbol of power, " Hey, what arc you going to do with me ? ”
He made no suggestions, but cannot be blamed for it. It was
the essence of his case against society that it had left him unfit
to offer suggestions, unable to form thoughts or design actions
other than the crudest and most violent. He lived many years
in prison, almost until his like had found a vocabulary and a
name for themselves and had astonished the world with the
farce of Fascism.

So Elizabeth died, with a terrible ease. All her life her
corsets had deformed and impeded her beautiful body, but they

PROLOGUE

did not protect her from the assassin’s stiletto. That cut clean
through to her heart. Even so her imperial rank had insulated
her from emotional and intellectual achievement, but freely
admitted sorrow. And it would not leave her alone after her
death. She had expressed in her will a solemn desire to be
buried in the Isle of Corfu, but for all that Franz Josef had her
laid in the Hapsburg vault at the Capuchin church of Vienna,
fifteenth in the row of Empresses. The Hapsburgs did not
restrict themselves to the fields of the living in the exercise of
their passion for preventing people from doing what they liked.
Rudolf also asked that he might not be buried among his ances-
tors, but he had to yield up his skeleton ; and the Prime Minister
himself. Count Taaffe, called on Marie Vetsera’s mother and
asked her not to pray beside her daughter’s grave, and received
many police reports on her refusal to abandon this practice,
which seems innocent enough even from the point of view of the
court, since the whole of Vienna already knew how the girl had
died. This was the kind of matter the Austrian Secret Police
could handle. In the more important matter of keeping Royal
Personages alive they were not nearly so successful.

After that Austria became a quiet place in Western eyes.
Proust has pointed out that if one goes on performing any action,
however banal, long enough, it automatically becomes " won-
derful ” ; a simple walk down a hundred yards of village street
is “ wonderful ” if it is made every Sunday by an old lady of
eighty. Franz Josef had for so long risen from his camp bed at
four o’clock in the morning and worked twelve or fourteen hours
on his official papers that he was recognised as one of the most
" wonderful " of sovereigns, almost as " wonderful " as Queen
Victoria, though he had shown no signs of losing in age the
obstinacy and lack of imagination that made him see it as his
duty to preserve his court as a morgue of etiquette and his Empire
as a top-heavy anachronism. He was certain of universal
acclamation not only during his life but after his death, for it is
the habit of the people, whenever an old man mismanages his
business so that it falls to pieces as soon as he dies, to say, " Ah,
So-and-so was a marvel ! He kept things together so long as
he was alive, and look what happens now he has gone I ” It
was true that there was already shaping in his court a disaster
that was to consume us all ; but this did not appear to English
eyes, largely because Austria was visited before the war only by

12 BLACK LAMB AND GREY FALCON

our upper classes, who in no country noticed anything but horses,
and Austrian horses were good.

The next time the red light of violence shone out it seemed
of no importance, an irrelevant horror. When I was ten years
old, on June the eleventh, 1903, Alexander Obrenovitch, King of
Serbia, and his wife Draga were murdered in the Palace at Bel-
grade, and their naked bodies thrown out of their bedroom into
the garden. The Queen’s two brothers and two Ministers were also
killed. The murder was the work of a number of Army officers,
none of whom was then known outside Serbia, and the main
characters were not interesting. Alexander was a flabby young
man with pince-nez who had a taste for clumsy experiments in
absolutism, and his wife, who strangely enough belonged to the
same type as Marie Vetsera, though she had in her youth been
far more beautiful, was understood to have the disadvantages of
being disreputable, having an ambitious family, and lying under
the suspicion of having tried to palm off a borrowed baby as an
heir to the throne. There can be no question that these people
were regarded with terrified apprehension by the Serbians, who
had freed themselves from the Turk not a hundred years before
and knew that their independence was perpetually threatened by
the great powers. The crime lingered in my mind only because
of its nightmare touches. The conspirators blew open the door
of the Palace with a dynamite cartridge which fused the electric
lights, and they stumbled about blaspheming in the darkness,
passing into a frenzy of cruelty that was half terror. The King and
Queen hid in a secret cupboard in their bedroom for two hours,
listening to the searchers grow cold, then warm, then cold again,
then warm, and at last hot, and burning hot. The weakly King
was hard to kill : when they threw him from the balcony they
thought him doubly dead from bullet wounds and sword slashes,
but the fingers of his right hand clasped the railing and had to
be cut off before he fell to the ground, where the fingers of his
left hand clutched the grass. Though it was June, rain fell on
the naked bodies in the early morning as they lay among the
flowers. The whole of Europe was revolted. Edward VII with-
drew his Minister and most of the great powers followed his
example.

That murder was just a half-tone square, dimly figured with
horror, at the back of my mind : a Police News poster or the
front page of a tabloid, seen years ago. But now I realise that

PROLOGUE

when Alexander and Draga fell from that balcony the whole of
the modem world fell with them. It took some time to reach
the ground and break its neck, but its fall started then. For
this is not a strictly moral universe, and it is not true that it is
useless to kill a tyrant because a worse man takes his place. It
has never been more effectively disproved than by the successor
of Alexander Obrenovitch. Peter Karageorgevitch came to the
throne under every possible disadvantage. He was close on
sixty and had never seen Serbia since he left it with his exiled
father at the age of fourteen ; he had been brought up at Geneva
under the influence of Swiss Liberalism and had later become
an officer in the French Army ; he had no experience of state-
craft, and he was a man of modest and retiring personality and
simple manners, who had settled down happily at Geneva, to
supervise the education of his three motherless children and
pursue mildly bookish interests. It appears to be true that
though he had told the conspirators of his readiness to accept
the ^rbian throne if Alexander Obrenovitch vacated it, he had
had no idea that they proposed to do anything mere violent than
force an abdication ; after all, his favourite author was John
Stuart Mill. The Karageorgevitch belief in the sacredness of
the dynasty brought him back to Belgrade, but it might have
been safely wagered that he would need all the support he could
get to stay there. He was entirely surrounded by the con-
spirators whose crime he abhorred, and he could not dismiss
them, because in sober fact they numbered amongst them some
of the ablest and most public-spirited men in Serbia ; and with
these fierce critics all about him perfectly capable of doing what
they had done before, he had to keep order in a new and ex-
panding country, vexed with innumerable internal and external
difficulties.

But Peter Karageorgevitch was a great king. Slowly and
soberly he proved himself one of the finest Liberal statesmen in
Europe, and later, in the Balkan wars which drove the Turk
out of Macedonia and Old Serbia, he proved himself a magnifi-
cent soldier. Never was there worse luck for Europe. Austria,
with far more territory than she could properly administer,
wanted more and had formed her Drang nach Osten, her
Hasten to the East policy. Now the formidable new military
state of Serbia was in her way, and might even join with Russia
to attack her. Now, too, all the Slav peoples of the Empire

BLACK LAMB AND C»£Y FALCON

were seething with discontent because the free Serbians were
doing so well, and the German-Austrians hated them more than
ever. The situation had been further complicated since Rudolfs
day because the Empire had affronted Slav feeling by giving up
the pretence that Bosnia and Herzegovina were provinces which
she merely occupied and administered, and formally annexing
them. This made many Slavs address appeals to Serbia, which,
as was natural in a young country, sometimes answered boastfully.

The situation was further complicated by the character of the
man who had succeeded Rudolf as the heir to the Imperial
Crown, the Archduke Franz Ferdinand of Este. This unlovable
melancholic had upset all sections of the people by his proposals,
drafted and expressed without the slightest trace of statesman-
ship, to make a tripartite monarchy of the Empire, by forming
the Slavs into a separate kingdom. The reactionaries felt this
was merely an expression of his bitter hostility towards the
Emperor and his conservatism ; the Slavs were unimpressed and
declared they would rather be free like Serbia. The reaction of
Austria to this new situation was extravagant fear. The Austrian
Chief of General Staff, Conrad von Hotzendorf, was speaking
for many of his countrymen and most of his class when he
ceaselessly urged that a preventive war should be waged against
Serbia before she became more capable of self-defence. He and
his kind would not have felt this if Alexander Obrcnovitch had
not been murdered and given place to a better man, who made a
strong and orderly Serbia.

Then on June the twenty-eighth, 1914, the Austro-Hun-
garian Government allowed Franz Ferdinand to go to Bosnia
in his capacity of Inspector-General of the Army to conduct
manoeuvres on the Serbian frontier. It was strange that he
should wish to do this, and that they should allow him, for that
is St. Vitus’ Day, the anniversary of the battle of Kossovo in
1389, the defeat of the Serb princes by the Turks which meant
five hundred years of enslavement. That defeat had been wiped
out in the Balkan War by the recapture of Kossovo, and it was
not tactful to remind the Serbs that some of their people were
still enslaved by a foreign power. But Franz Ferdinand had
his wish and then paid a visit to Sarajevo, the Bosnian capital,
where the police gave him quite insufficient protection, though
they had been warned that attempts were to be made on his
life. A Bosnian Serb named Princip, who deeply resented

PROLOGUE

Austro-Hungarian misrule, was able without any difficulty to
shoot him as he drove along the street, and accidentally killed
his wife as well. It must be noted that he was a Serb and not a
Serbian. A Croat is a Catholic member and a Serb an Orthodox
member of a Slav people that lies widely distributed south of the
Danube, between the Adriatic and Bulgaria, and north of the
Greek mountains. A Serbian is a subject of the kingdom of
Serbia, and might be a Croat, just as a Croatian-bom inhabitant
of the old Austrian province of Croatia might be a Serb. But
Princip had brought his revolver from Belgrade, and though he
had been given it by a private individual and not by the Govern-
ment, the Austro-Hungarian Empire used this as a pretext to
declare war on Serbia. Other powers took sides and the Great
War started.

Of that assassination I remember nothing at all. Every
detail of Elizabeth’s death is clear in my mind, of the Belgrade
massacre I keep a blurred image, but I cannot recall reading
anything about the Sarajevo attentat or hearing anyone speak of
it. I was then very busy being an idiot, being a private person,
and I had enough on my hands. But my idiocy was like my
anaesthetic. During the blankness it dispensed I was cut about
and felt nothing, but it could not annul the consequences. The
pain came afterwards.

So, that evening in 1934, I lay in bed and looked at my radio
fearfully, though it had nothing more to say that was relevant,
and later on the telephone talked to my husband, as one does in
times of crisis if one is happily married, asking him questions
which one knows quite well neither he nor anyone else can
answer and deriving great comfort from what he says. I was
really frightened, for all these earlier killings had either hastened
doom towards me or prefigured it. If Rudolf had not died he
might have solved the Slav problem of the Austro-Hungarian
Empire and restrained its Imperialist ambition, and there might
have been no war. If Alexander Obrenovitch had not been
killed Serbia might never have been strong enough to excite the
Empire’s jealousy and fear, and there might have been no war.
The killing of Franz Ferdinand was war itself. And the death
of Elizabeth had shown me the scourge of the world after the
war, Luccheni, Fascism, the rule of the dispossessed class that
claims its rights and cannot conceive them save in terms of
empty violence, of killing, taking, suppressing.

i6 BLACK LAMB AND GREY FALCON

And now there was another killing. Again it was in the
South-East of Europe, where was the source of all the other
deaths. That seemed to me strange, in 1934, because the Slav
problem then seemed to have been satisfactorily settled by the
war. The Czechs and the Slovaks had their pleasant democratic
state, which was working well enough except for the complaints
of the Sudeten Germans who under the Hapsburgs had been
pampered with privileges paid for by their Slav neighbours.
The Slovenes and the Croats and the Dalmatians and the Monte-
negrins were now united in the kingdom of the South Slavs,
which is what Yugoslavia means ; and though the Slovenes and
Croats and the Dalmatians were separated in spirit from the
Serbs by their Catholicism and the Montenegrins hankered after
their lost independence, the state had seemed to be finding its
balance. But here was another murder, another threat that
man was going to deliver himself up to pain, was going to serve
death instead of life.

A few days later my husband told me that he had seen a
news film which had shown with extraordinary detail the actual
death of the King of Yugoslavia, and as soon as I could leave
the nursing-home I went and saw it. I had to go to a private
projection room, for by that time it had been withdrawn from
the ordinary cinemas, and I took the opportunity to have it run
over several times, while I peered at it like an old woman reading
the tea-leaves in her cup. First there was the Yugoslavian war-
ship sliding into the harbour of Marseilles, which I know very
well. Behind it was that vast suspension bridge which always
troubles me because it reminds me that in this mechanised
age I am as little able to understand my environment as any
primitive woman who thinks that a waterfall is inhabited by a
spirit, and indeed less so, for her opinion might from a poetical
point of view be correct. I know enough to be aware that this
bridge cannot have been spun by a vast steel spider out of its
entrails, but no other explanation seems to me as plausible, and
1 have not the faintest notion of its use. But the man who comes
down the gangway of the ship and travels on the tender to the
quay, him I can understand, for he is something that is not new.
Always the people have had the idea of the leader, and some-
times a man is born w’ho embodies this idea.

His face is sucked too close to the bone by sickness to be
tranquil or even handsome, and it would at any time have sug-

PROLOGUE

«7

gested a dry pedantry, unnatural in a man not far advanced in
the forties. But he looks like a great man, which is not to say
that he is a good man or a wise man, but is to say that he has
that historic quality which comes from intense concentration on
an important subject. What he is thinking of is noble, to jud^e
from the homage he pays it with his eyes, and it governs him
entirely. He does not relapse into it when the other world fails
to interest him, rather does he relapse into noticing what is about
him when for a moment his interior communion fails him. But
he is not abstracted, he is paying due respect to the meeting
between France and Yugoslavia. Indeed he is bringing to the
official occasion a naive earnestness. When Monsieur Barthou,
the French Foreign Minister, comes and greets him, it is as if a
jolly priest, fully at ease in his orders, stands before the altar
beside a tortured mystical layman. Sometimes, too, he shows
by a turn of the head, by a dilation of the pinched nostrils, that
some aspect of the scene has pleased him.

About all his reactions there is that jerky quickness which
comes of long vigilance. It was natural. He had been a soldier
from boyhood, and since the Great War he had perpetually been
threatened with death from within, by tuberculosis, and with
death from without, by assassination at the hand of Croats or
Macedonians who wanted independence instead of union with
Serbia. But it is not fear that is his preoccupation. That, cer-
tainly, is Yugoslavia. He has the look of one of those men who
claim that they rule by divine right whether they be kings or
presidents, because their minds curve protectively over their
countries with the inclusiveness of the sky. When one sees
President Roosevelt one is sure that he is thinking about
America ; sometimes his thought may be soft and loose, but it
is always dedicated to the same service. Those who saw Lenin
say that he was always thinking of Russia ; even when his
thought was hard and tight it knew the same dedication. In our
own King George V we recognised that piety.

Now King Alexander is driving down the familiar streets,
curiously unguarded, in a curiously antique car. It can be seen
from his attempt to make his stiff hand supple, from a careless
flash of his careful black eyes, it can be seen that he is taking the
cheers of the crowd with a childish seriousness. It is touching,
like a girl putting full faith in the compliments that are paid to
her at a ball. Then his preoccupation veils his brows and desic-

i8 BLACK LAMB AND GREY FALCON

cates his lips. He is thinking of Yugoslavia again, with the
nostalgia of an author who has been interrupted in writing his
new book. He might be thinking, " Heureux qui, comme
Ulysse, a fait un beau voyage. . . .” But then the camera
leaves him. It recedes. The sound-track records a change, a
swelling astonishment, in the voice of the crowd. We see a man
jumping on the footboard of the car, a soldier swinging a
sword, a revolver in the hand of another, a straw hat lying on the
ground, a crowd that jumps up and down, up and down, smash-
ing something flat with its arms, kicking something flat with its
feet, till there is seen on the pavement a pulp covered with gar-
ments. A lad in a sweater dodges before his captors, his defiant
face unmarked by fear, although his body expresses the very last
extreme of fear by a creeping writhing motion. A view of the
whole street shows people dashed about as by a tangible wind
of death.

The camera returns to the car and we see the King. He is
lying almost flat on his back on the seat, and he is as I was after
the anaesthetic. He does not know that anything has happened,
he is still half-rooted in the pleasure of his own nostalgia. He
might be asking, “ Et en quelle saison Revoiray-je Ic clos de ma
pauvre maison, Qui m’est une province et beaucoup d’avan-
tage ? ” It is certain that he is dying, because he is the
centre of a manifestation which would not happen unless the
living had been shocked out of their reserve by the presence
of death. Innumerable hands are caressing him. Hands are
coming from everywhere, over the back of the car, over the sides,
through the windows, to caress the dying King, and they are
supremely kind. They are far kinder than faces can be, for
faces are Marthas, burdened with many cares because of their
close connection with the mind, but these hands express the
mindless sympathy of living flesh for flesh that is about to die,
the pure physical basis for pity. They are men’s hands, but
they move tenderly as the hands of women fondling their babies,
they stroke his cheek as if they were washing it w'ith kindness.
Suddenly his nostalgia goes from him. His pedantry relaxes.
He is at peace, he need not guard against death any more.

Then the camera shows an official running wildly dowm a
street in top-hat and frock-coat, demonstrating the special
ridiculousness of middle-aged men, who have the sagging,
anxious faces and protruding bellies appropriate to pregnancies.

death of ALEXANDER KAKAGEORGEVITCH, KING OF YUGOSLAVIA
Marseilles, Qth October 1934

MARKKT-PLArK AT ZACRKB

PROLOGUE

«9

but bring forth nothing. It would be a superb ending for a
comic him. Then we see again the warship and the harbour,
wfa^ the President of the Republic stands with many men
around him, who are all as naively earnest as only one man was
when that ship first came into the harbour. Now there is no
jolly priest confident that he has the sacred mysteries well in
hand : Barthou by now was also dead. All these men look as
the King looked at his coming, as if there lay behind the surface
of things a reality which at any moment might manifest itself as
a eucharist to be partaken of not by individuals, but by nations.
The coffin containing the man through which this terrible sacra-
ment has been dispensed to France is carried on board, and the
warship takes it away from these people, who stand in a vast
circle, rigid with horror and reverence. They are intensely sur-
prised that the eucharist was of this nature, but the King of
Yugoslavia had always thought it might be so.

I could not understand this event, no matter how often I saw
this picture. I knew, of course, how and why the murder had
happened. Luccheni has got on well in the world. When he
killed Elizabeth, over forty years ago, he had to do his own work
in the world, he had to travel humbly about Switzerland in
search of his victims, he had but one little two-edged dagger as
tool for his crime, and he had to pay the penalty. But now
Luccheni is Mussolini, and the improvement in his circumstances
can be measured by the increase in the magnitude of his crime.
In Elizabeth the insecure and traditionless town-dweller struck
down the symbol of power, but his modern representative has
struck down power itself by assuming itself and degrading its
essence. His offence is not that he has virtually deposed his
king, for kings and presidents who cannot hold their office lose
thereby the title to their kingdoms and republics. His offence
is that he made himself dictator without binding himself by any
of the contractual obligations which civilised man has imposed
on his rulers in all creditable phases of history and which give
power a soul to be saved. This cancellation of process in govern-
ment leaves it an empty violence that must perpetually and at
any cost outdo itself, for it has no alternative idea and hence no
alternative activity. The long servitude in the slums has left
this kind of barbarian without any knowledge of what man does
when he ceases to be violent, except for a few uncomprehending
glimpses of material prosperity. He therefore can conceive of

ao BLACK LAMB AND GREY FALCON

no outlet for his energies other than the creation of social ser-
vices which artificially and unnaturally spread this material pros-
perity among the population, in small doses that keep them
happy and dependent ; and, for his second string, there is the
performance of fantasias on the single theme of brute force. All
forms of compulsion are practised on any element within the
state that is resistant or is even suspected of retaining conscious-
ness of its difference from the dominating party ; and all living
beings outside the state are conceived as enemies, to be hated
and abused, and in ideal conditions to be robbed and murdered.
This aggressiveness leads obviously to the establishment of
immense armed forces, and furtively to incessant experimenta-
tion with methods of injuring the outer world other than the
traditional procedure of warfare.

These methods, as time went on and Mussolini developed
his foreign policy, included camps where Croats and Macedo-
nians who objected to incorporation with Yugoslavia, or who
were simply rogues, were trained as terrorists in the use of
bombs and small arms and financed to use the results of that
training in raids on Yugoslavia in the alleged service of their
separatist campaigns. There could be no more convincing proof
of the evil wrought on our civilisation by the great cities and
their spawn, for in not one state in pre-war Europe could there
have been found any such example of an institution designed to
teach the citizens of another state to murder their rulers. The
existence of these camps and the necessity felt by human beings
to practise any art they have learned, explains the assassination
of King Alexander without properly conveying its indecency.
For Italy instructed her satellite, Hungary, to follow her example,
and a notorious camp was established near the Yugoslav-Hun-
garian border, at Yanka Puszta. Honour often seems a highly
artificial convention, but life in any level of society where it has
been abandoned astonishes by its tortuousness. When the
Italians sent assassins from their training camps to murder the
King, they went to great pains to make it appear that his
murderers came from Yanka Puszta, even inducing a Macedo-
nian assassin who had been associated with the Hungarian
camp to come to Marseilles and be killed, so that his dead body
could be exhibited as proof of the conspirators’ origin. It is a
measure of the inevitable frivolity of a state governed by Fascist
philosophy that the crime was entirely wasted and was com-

PROLOGUE

mitted only because of a monstrous miscalculation. Mussolini
had believed that with the King’s death the country would fall
to pieces and be an easy prey to a foreign invader. But if Croat
discontent had been a thousand times more bitter than it was, it
would still have remained true that people prefer to kill their
tyrants for themselves ; and actually the murder shocked Yugo-
slavia into a unity it had not known before. So there was not
war ; there was nothing except the accomplishment of a further
stage in the infiltration of peace with the depravity of war, which
threatens now to make the two hardly distinguishable.

But the other participator in the event remained profoundly
mysterious. At each showing of the film it could be seen more
plainly that he had not been surprised by his own murder. He
had not merely known of it as a factual possibility, he had
realised it imaginatively in its full force as an event. But in
this matter he seemed more intelligent than his own intelligence.
Men of action often take an obstinate pride in their own limita-
tions, and so, too, do invalids ; and his face hinted that he, being
both sick and soldierly, had combined the two forms of fault.
All that I could read of his reign confirmed this indication and
showed him as inflexible and slow. Yet there was in him this
great wisdom, which brought him to the hour of his death sus-
tained by a just estimate of what it is to die, and by certain
magnificent conceptions such as kingliness and patriotism. It
would be an enigma were it not that an individual had other
ways of acquiring wisdom than through his own intellectual
equipment. He can derive it, as it were, through the pores
from the culture of his race. Perhaps this peculiar wisdom
which appeared on the screen as definitely as the peculiar sanity
of Fran^oise Rosay or the peculiar narcissism of Garbo, was
drawn by the King of Yugoslavia from the kingdom of Yugo-
slavia, from the South Slavs.

As to that I could form no opinion, for I knew nothing about
the South Slavs, nor had I come across anybody who was
acquainted with them. I was only aware that they formed part
of the Balkan people, who had played a curious role in the
history of British benevolence before the war and for some
time after it. They had been, till they severally won their inde-
pendences at various times in the nineteenth and twentieth
centuries, the Christian subjects of the Turkish or Ottoman
Empire, which had kept them in the greatest misery by incom-

VOL. I C

*a BLACK LAMB AND GREY FALCON

petent administration and very cunningly set each section of
them at odds with all the others, so that they could never rise
in united rebellion. Hence each people was perpetually making
charges of inhumanity against all its neighbours. The Serb,
for example, raised his bitterest complaint against the Turk,
but was also ready to accuse the Greeks, the Bulgarians, the
Vlachs and the Albanians of every crime under the sun. English
persons, therefore, of humanitarian and reformist disposition
constantly went out to the Balkan Peninsula to see who was
in fact ill-treating whom, and, being by the very nature of their
perfectionist faith unable to accept the horrid hypothesis that
everybody was ill-treating everybody else, all came back with
a pet Balkan people established in their hearts as suffering
and innocent, eternally the massacree and never the massacrer.
The same sort of person, devoted to good works and austerities,
who is traditionally supposed to keep a cat and a parrot, often
set up on the hearth the image of the Albanian or the Bulgarian
or the Serbian or the Macedonian Greek people, which had
all the force and blandness of pious fantasy. The Bulgarians
as preferred by some, and the Albanians as championed by
others, strongly resembled Sir Joshua Reynolds’ picture of the
Infant Samuel.

But often it appeared that the Balkans had forced piety to
work on some very queer material. To hear Balkan fanciers
talk about each other’s Infant Samuels was to think of some
painter not at all like Sir Joshua Reynolds, say Hieronymus
Bosch. The cats and parrots must often have been startled.
In 1912 there was a dispute, extravagantly inappropriate to those
who took part in it, as to whether Mr. Prochaska, the Austrian
Consul in a town named Prizren, had or had not been castrated
by the Serbs. Mr. Prochaska, an unusually conscientious public
servant, furthered his country's anti-Serbian policy by allowing
it to be supposed that he had. The reception given to the story
by the Viennese public can only be described as heartless, but
it was taken more seriously in London, where persons of the
utmost propriety became violent in their partisanship. England
had been artless, and was to remain so, about atrocities. Our
soldiers and sailors were wont to keep silence when they came
back from those foreign parts where primitive cruelty still in-
dulged its fantasies. But mild humanitarians to whom the idea
of castration must have been a shocking novelty, choked, swal-

PROLOGUE

lowed, and set themselves to discussing whether Mr. Prochaska’s
misfortunes could be as they were said to be, and who had
inflicted them, and how. The controversy raged until Professor
Seton-Watson, who had no favourite among the Balkan peoples,
but was strongly anti-Austrian, stated that he had himself had
access to a confidential account from Mr. Prochaska, which made
irclear that the operation had not been performed at all. In no
other circumstances could one imagine that gentle and elevated
character receiving communications which afforded that kind of
information. No other cause espoused by Liberals so completely
swept them off their feet by its own violence. The problems of
India and Africa never produced anything like the jungle of
savage pamphlets that sprang up in the footsteps of the Liberals
who visited Turkey in Europe imder the inspiration of Gladstone.

Violence was, indeed, all I knew of the Balkans : all I knew
of the South Slavs. I derived the knowledge from memories of
my earliest interest in Liberalism, of leaves fallen from this
jungle of pamphlets, tied up with string in the dustiest corners
of junk-shops, and later from the prejudices of the French, who
use the word Balkan as a term of abuse, meaning a rastaquoulre
type of barbarian. In Paris, awakened in a hotel bedroom by
the insufficiently private life of my neighbours, I have heard the
sound of three slashing slaps and a woman’s voice crying through
sobs, “ Balkan ! Balkan ! ” Once in Nice, as I sat eating
langouste outside a little restaurant down by the harbour, there
were some shots, a sailor lurched out of the next-door bar, and
the proprietress ran after him, shouting, " Balkan ! Balkan I "
He had emptied his revolver into the mirror behind the bar. And
now I was faced with the immense nobility of the King in the
film, who was certainly Balkan, Balkan, but who met violence
with an imaginative realisation which is its very opposite, which
absorbs it into the experience it aims at destroying. But I must
have been wholly mistaken in my acceptance of the popular
legend regarding the Balkans, for if the South Slavs had been
truly violent they would not have been hated first by the Austrians,
who worshipped violence in an imperialist form, and later by
the Fascists, who worship violence in a totalitarian form. Yet
it was impossible to think of the Balkans for one moment as
gentle and lamb-like, for assuredly Alexander and Draga
Obrenovitch and Franz Ferdinand and his wife had none of
them died in their beds. I had to admit that I quite simply

94 BLACK LAMB AND GREY FALCON

and flatly knew nothing at all about the south-eastern corner
of Europe ; and since there proceeds steadily from that place a
stream of events which are a source of danger to me, which
indeed for four years threatened my safety and during that
time deprived me for ever of many benefits, that is to say I
know nothing of my own destiny.

That is a calamity. Pascal wrote : “ Man is but a reed, the
most feeble thing in nature ; but he is a thinking reed. The
entire universe need not arm itself to crush him. A vapour, a
drop of water, suffices to kill him. But if the universe were to
crush him, man would still be more noble than that which
killed him, because he knows that he dies and the advantage
which the universe has over him ; the universe knows nothing
of this.” In these words he writes the sole prescription for a
distinguished humanity. We must learn to know the nature of
the advantage which the universe has over us, which in my case
seems to lie in the Balkan Peninsula. It w'as only two or three
days distant, yet 1 had never troubled to go that short journey
which might explain to me how I shall die, and why. While I
was marvelling at my inertia, I was asked to go to Yugoslavia
to give some lectures in different towns before universities and
English clubs, and this I did in the spring of 1936.

It was unfortunate that at the end of my journey I went to
Greece and was stung by a sand-fly and got dengue fever, which
is also known, and justly so, as breakbone fever. On the way
back I had to rest in a Kurhaus outside Vienna, and there they
thought me so ill that my husband came out to fetch me home.
He found me weeping in my bedroom, though this is a town
governed by its flowers, and as it was May the purple and white
lilacs were as thick along the streets as people watching for a
procession, and the chestnut trees were holding their candles to
the windows of the upper rooms. I was well enough to be out,
but I was sitting in a chair with a heap of coarse linen dresses
flung over my knees and feet. I showed them to my husband
one by one, saying in remorse, ” Look what I have let them do ! ”
They were dresses which I had bought from the peasants in
Macedonia, and the Austrian doctor who was treating me had
made me have them disinfected, though they were quite clean.
But the nurse who took them away had forgotten what was to
be done with them, and instead of putting them under the lamp
she had given them to the washerwoman, who had put them in

PROLOGUE

strong soak. They were ruined. Dyes that had been fixed for
twenty years, had run and now defiled the good grain of the
stuff; stitches that had made a clean-cut austere design were
now sordid smears. Even if I could have gone back immedi-
ately and bought new ones, which in my weakness I wanted
to do, I would have it on my conscience that 1 had not properly
protected the work of these women which should have been
kept as a testimony, which was a part of what the King had
known as he lay dying.

" You must not think me stupid,” I said to my husband ;
“ you cannot understand why I think these dresses important ;
you have not been there.” “ Is it so wonderful there ? ” he
asked. " It is more wonderful than I can tell you,” I answered.
“ But how ? " he said. I could not tell him at all clearly. I said,
" Well, there is everything there. Except what we have. But
that seems very little.” “ Do you mean that the English have
very little ? ” he asked, “ Or the whole of the West ? ” “ The
whole of the West,” I said, “ here too.” He looked at the butter-
yellow baroque houses between the chestnut trees and laughed.
" Beethoven and Mozart and Schubert wrote quite a lot of music
in this town,” he said. ” But they were none of them happy,” I
objected. ” In Yugoslavia,” suggested my husband, smiling,
“ everybody is happy.” " No, no,” I said, “ not at all, but . . .”
The thing I wanted to tell him could not be told, however,
because it was manifold and nothing like what one is accus-
tomed to communicate by words. I stumbled on, “ Really, we
are not as rich in the West as we think we are. Or, rather, there
is much we have not got which the people in the Balkans have
got in quantity. To look at them you would think they had
nothing. The people who made these dresses looked as if they
had nothing at all. But if these imbeciles here had not spoiled
this embroidery you would see that whoever did it had more
than we have.” I saw the blue lake of Ochrid, the mosques of
Sarajevo, the walled town of Korchula, and it appeared possible
that I was unable to find words for what I wanted to say because
it was not true. I am never sure of the reality of what I see, if I
have only seen it once ; I know that until it has finnly estab-
lished its objective existence by impressing my senses and my
memory, I am capable of conscripting it into the service of a
private dream. In a panic I said, “ I must go back to Yugo-
slavia, this time next year, in the spring, for Easter.”

JOURNEY

*W''W''W''W''W''W''W'

WE spent the night at Salzburg, and in the morning vre
had time to visit the house where Mozart was born, and
look at his little spinet, which has keys that are brown
and white instead of white and black. There the boy sat, pleased
by its prettiness and pleased by the sounds he drew from it, while
there encircled him the rage of his father at this tiresome, weak,
philandering son he had begotten, who would make no proper
use of his gifts ; and further back still the indifference of his
contemporaries, which was to kill him ; and further back still,
so far away as to be of no use to him, our impotent love for him.
That was something we humans did not do very well. Then we
went down to the railway station and waited some hours for the
train to Zagreb, the capital of Croatia. When it at last arrived,
I found myself in the midst of what is to me the mystery of
mysteries. For it had left Berlin the night before and was
crammed with unhappy-looking German tourists, all taking
advantage of the pact by which they could take a substantial sum
out of the country provided they were going to Y ugoslavia ; and
I cannot understand the proceedings of Germans. All Central
Europe seems to me to be enacting a fantasy which I cannot
interpret.

The carriages were so crowded that we could only find one
free seat in a first-class compartment, which I took, while my
husband sat down in a seat which a young man had just left to
go to the restaurant car for lunch. The other people in the
compartment were an elderly business man and his wife, both
well on in the fifties, and a manufacturer and his wife, socially
superior to the others and fifteen to twenty years younger. The
elderly business man and his wife, like nearly everybody else on

JOURNEY *7

the train, were hideous ; the woman had a body like a sow,
and the man was flabby and pasty. The manufacturer was very
much better-looking, with a direct laughing eye, but he was
certainly two stone overweight, and his wife had been sharpened
to a dark keen prettiness by some Hungarian strain. The
business man's wife kept on leaving her seat and running up
and down the corridor in a state of great distress, lamenting that
she and her husband had no Austrian schillings and therefore
could not get a meal in the restaurant car. Her distress was so
marked that we assumed that they had eaten nothing for many
hours, and we gave her a packet of chocolate and some biscuits,
which she ate very quickly with an abstracted air. Between
mouthfuls she explained that they were travelling to a Dalmatian
island because her husband had been very ill with a nervous
disorder affecting the stomach which made him unable to take
decisions. She pointed a bitten bar of chocolate at him and
said, “ Yes, he can’t make up his mind about anything ! If you
say, ‘ Do you want to go or do you want to stay ? ’ he doesn’t
know.” Grieving and faithful love shone in her eyes. My
husband was very sympathetic, and said that he himself had
nervous trouble of some sort. He even alleged, to my surprise,
that he had passed through a similar period of not knowing
his own mind. Sunshine, he said, he had found the only cure.

But as she spoke her eyes shifted over my husband’s shoulders
and she cried, " Ah, now we are among beautiful mountains I
Wunderbar ! Fabelhaft ! Ach, these must be the Dolomites ! ”
” No, these are not the Dolomites,” said my husband, " this is
the valley that runs up to Bad Gastein,” and he told her that in
the sixteenth century this had been a district of great wealth and
culture, because it had been a gold-mining centre. He pointed
out the town of Hof Gastein and described the beautiful Gothic
tombs of mineowners in the church there, which are covered
with carvings representing stages of the mining process. Every-
body in the carriage listened to this with sudden proud exclama-
tory delight ; it was as if they were children, and my husband
were reading them a legend out of a book about their glorious
past. They seemed to derive a special pious pleasure from the
contemplation of the Gothic ; and they were also enraptured by
the perfection of my husband’s German.

" But it is real German German ! ” they said, as if they
were complimenting him on being good as well as clever.

28 BLACK LAMB AND OBEY FALCON

Suddenly the manufacturer said to him, " But have 3mu really
got first-class tickets ? " My husband said in surprise, “ Yes,
of course we have ; here they are.” Then the manufacturer
said, “ Then you can keep the seat where you are sitting, for
the young man who had it has only a second-class ticket 1 ”
The others all eagerly agreed. " Yes, yes,” they said, “ cer-
tainly you must stay where you are, for he has only a second-
class ticket ! ” The business man’s wife jumped up and stopped
a passing ticket-collector and told him about it with great
passion and many defensive gestures towards us, and he too
became excited and sympathetic. He promised that, as lunch
was now finished and people were coming back from the
restaurant car, he would wait for the young man and eject
him. It was just then that the business man’s wife noticed
that we were rising into the snowhelds at the head of the pass
and cried out in rapture. This too was wunderbar and fabelhaft,
and the whole carriage was caught up into a warm lyrical
ecstasy. Snow, apparently, was certified in the philosophy as a
legitimate object for delight, like the Gothic. For this I liked
them enormously. Not only was it an embryonic emotion
which, fully developed and shorn of its sentimentality, would
produce great music of the Beethoven and Brahms and Mahler
type, but it afforded an agreeable contrast to the element I most
dislike. If anyone in a railway carriage full of English people
should express great enjoyment of the scenery through which
the train was passing, his companions would feel an irresistible
impulse not only to refrain from joining him in his pleasure,
but to persuade themselves that there was something despicable
and repellent in that scenery. No conceivable virtue can proceed
from the development of this characteristic.

At the height of this collective rhapsody the young man with
the second-class ticket came back. He had been there for a
minute or two before anybody, even the ticket-collector, noticed
his presence. He was standing in the middle of the compart-
ment, not even understanding that his seat had been taken, as my
husband was at the window, when the business man’s wife became
aware of him. " Oho-o-o-o ! ” she cried with frightful signifi-
cance : and everybody turned on him with such vehemence that
he stood stock-still with amazement, and the ticket-collector had
to pull him by the sleeve and tell him to take his luggage and
be gone. The vehemence of all four Germans was so intense

JOURNEY 29

that we took it for granted that it must be due to some other
reason than concern for our comfort, and supposed the explana-
tion lay in the young man's race and personality, for he was
Latin and epicene. His oval olive face was meek with his ac-
ceptance of the obligation to please, and he wore with a demure
coquetry a suit, a shirt, a tie, socks, gloves and a hat all in the
colours of coffee-and-cream of various strengths. The labels
on his suitcase suggested he was either an actor or a dancer,
and indeed his slender body was as unnaturally compressed by
exercise as by a corset. Under this joint attack he stood quite
still with his head down and his body relaxed, not in indiffer-
ence, but rather because his physical training had taught him
to loosen his muscles when he was struck so that he should fall
light. There was an air of practice about him, as if he were
thoroughly used to being the object of official hostility, and a
kind of passive, not very noble fortitude ; he was quite sure he
would survive this, and would be able to walk away unhurt.
We were distressed, but could not believe we were responsible,
since the feeling of the Germans was so passionate ; and indeed
this young man was so different from them that it was conceiv-
able they felt as hippopotamuses at the Zoo might feel if a
cheetah were introduced into their cage.

By the time he had left us the train was drawing in to Bad
Gastein. The business man’s wife was upset because she
could get nothing to eat there. The trolleys carrying chocolate
and coffee and oranges and sandwiches were busy with another
train when we arrived, and they started on our train too late to
arrive at our carriage. She said that she did not mind so much
for herself as for her husband. He had had nothing since break-
fast at Munich except some sausages and coffee at Passau and
some ham sandwiches at Salzburg. As he had also eaten some
of the chocolate and biscuits we had given her, it seemed to us
he had not done so badly for a man with a gastric ailment. Then
silence fell on her, and she sat down and dangled her short legs
while we went through the very long tunnel under the Hohe
Tauern mountains. This tunnel represents no real frontier.
They were still in Austria, and they had left Germany early that
morning. Yet when we came out on the other side all the four
Germans began to talk quickly and freely, as if they no longer
feared something. The manufacturer and his wife told us that
they were going to Hertseg Novi, a village on the South

30 BLACK LAMB AND GREY FALCON

Dalmatian coast, to bathe. They said he was tired out by various
difficulties which had arisen in the management of his business
during the last few months. At that the business man put his
forehead down on his hand and groaned. Then they all laughed
at their own distress ; and they all began to tell each other how
badly they had needed this holiday they were taking, and what
pension terms they v/ere going to pay, and by what date they
had to be back in Germany, and to discuss where they were
allowed to go as tourists and how much money they would have
been allowed if they had gone to other countries and in what
form they would have had to take it. The regulations which
bound them were obviously of an inconvenient intricacy, for
they frequently disputed as to the details ; and indeed they
frequently uttered expressions of despair at the way they were
hemmed in and harried.

They talked like that for a long time. Then somebody came
and told the business man’s wife that she could, after all, have a
meal in the restaurant car. She ran out in a great hurry, and
the rest of us all fell silent. I read for a time and then slept ;
and woke up just as the train was running into Villach, which is
a lovely little Austrian town set on a river. At Villach the
business man’s wife was overjoyed to find she could buy some
sausages for herself and her husband. All through the journey
she was eating voraciously, running after food down the corridor,
coming back munching something, her mouth and bust powdered
with crumbs. But there was nothing so voluptuous as greed
about all this eating. She was simply stoking herself with food
to keep her nerves going, as ill and tired people drink. Actually
she was an extremely pleasant and appealing person : she was
all goodness and kindness, and she loved her husband very
much. She took great pleasure in bringing him all this food,
and she liked pointing out to him anything beautiful that we
were passing. When she had got him to give his attention to it,
she looked no more at the beautiful thing but only at his face.
When we were going by the very beautiful Worther See, which
lay under the hills, veiled by their shadows and the dusk so that
one could attribute to it just the kind of beauty one prefers, she
made him look at it, looked at him looking at it, and then turned
to us and said, ” You cannot think what troubles he has had 1 ”
We made sympathetic noises, and the business man began to
grumble away at his ease. It appeared that he owned an apart-

JOURNEY 3,

ment house in Berlin, and had for six months been struggling
with a wholly unforeseen and inexplicable demand for extra
taxes on it. He did not allege that the tax was unjust. He
seemed to think that the demand was legal enough, but that the
relevant law was so complicated and was so capriciously inter-
preted by the Nazi courts, that he had been unable to foresee
how much he would be asked for, and was still quite at a loss to
calculate what might be exacted in the future. He had also had
a great deal of trouble dealing with some undesirable tenants,
whose conduct had caused frequent complaints from other
tenants, but who were members of the Nazi party. He left it
ambiguous whether he had tried to evict the undesirable tenants
and had been foiled by the N azis, or if he had been too frightened
even to try to get redress.

At that the manufacturer and his wife sighed, and said that
they could understand. The man spoke with a great deal of
reticence and obviously did not want to give away exactly what
his business was, lest he should get into difBculties ; but he said
with great resentment that the Nazis had put a director into his
company who knew nothing and was simply a Party man in line
for a job. He added, however, that what he really minded was
the unforeseeable taxes. He laughed at the absurdity of it all,
for he was a brave and jolly man ; but the mere fact that he
stopped giving us details of his worries, when he was obviously
extremely expansive by temperament, showed that his spirit was
deeply troubled. Soon he fell silent and put his arm round his
wife. The two had an air of being united by a great passion, an
unusual physical sympathy, and also by a common endurance
of stress and strain, to a degree which would have seemed more
natural in far older people. To cheer him up the wife told us
funny stories about some consequences of Hitlerismus. She
described how the hairdresser’s assistant who had always waved
her hair for her had one morning greeted her with tears, and
told her that she was afraid she would never be able to attend to
her again, because she was afraid she had failed in the examina-
tion which she had to pass for the right to practise her craft.
She had said to the girl, " But 1 am sure you will pass your
examination, for you are so very good at your work.” But the
girl had answered, “ Yes, I am good at my work ! Shampooing
can I do, and water-waving can I do, and marcelling can I do,
and oil massage can I do, and hair-dyeing can I do, but keep from

3a BLACK LAMB AND GREY FALCON

mixing up Goering’s and Goebbels* birthday, that can I not do.”
They all laughed at this, and then again fell silent.

The business man said, “ But all the young people they are
solid for Hitler. For them all is done.”

The others said, ” Ja, das ist so ! ” and the business woman
began " Yes, our sons,” and then stopped.

They were all of them falling to pieces under the emotional
and intellectual strain laid on them by their Government, poor
Laocoons strangled by red tape. It was obvious that by getting
the population into this state the Nazis had guaranteed the
continuance of their system ; for none of these people could
have given any effective support to any rival party that wanted
to seize power, and indeed their affairs, which were thoroughly
typical, were in such an inextricable state of confusion that no
sane party would now wish to take over the government, since
it would certainly see nothing but failure ahead. Their misery
seemed to have abolished every possible future for them. 1
reflected that if a train were filled with the citizens of the Western
Roman Empire in the fourth century they would have made
much the same complaints. The reforms of Diocletian and
Constantine created a condition of exorbitant and unforeseeable
taxes, of privileged officials, of a complicated civil administra-
tion that made endless demands on its subjects and gave them
very little security in return. The Western Romans were put
out of their pain by the invasion of the Goths. But these people
could not hope for any such release. It was like the story of the
man who went to Dr. Abernethy, complaining of hopeless
melancholy, and was advised to go and see the famous clown,
Grimaldi. " I am Grimaldi," he said. These men and women,
incapable of making decisions or enforcing a condition where
they could make them, were the Goths.

It was dark when we crossed the Yugoslavian frontier.
Handsome young soldiers in olive uniforms with faces sealed by
the flatness of cheekbones, asked us questions softly, insistently,
without interest. As we steamed out of the station, the manu-
facturer said with a rolling laugh, " Well, we'll have no more
good food till we’re back here again. The food in Yugoslavia
is terrible.” " Ach, so we have heard," wailed the business
man’s wife, “ and what shall I do with my poor man ! There is
nothing good at all, is there ? ” This seemed to me extremely
funny, for food in Yugoslavia has a Slav superbness. They cook

JOURNEY 33

Iamb and sucking-pig as well as anywhere in the world, have a
lot of freshwater fish and broil it straight out of the streams, use
their vegetables young enough, have many dark and rich
romantic soups, and understand that seasoning should be
pungent rather than hot. I said, " You needn’t worry at all.
Yugoslavian food is very good.” The manufacturer laughed
and shook his head. “ No, I was there in the war and it was
teiribld.” "Perhaps it was at that time,” I said, “but I was
there last year, and 1 found it admirable.” They all shook their
heads at me, smiling, and seemed a little embarrassed. I per-
ceived they felt that English food was so far inferior to German
that my opinion on the subject could not be worth having, and
that I was rather simple and ingenuous not to realise this. “ I
understand,” ventured my husband, " that there are very good
trout.” “ Ach, no ! ” laughed the manufacturer, waving his
great hand, “ they call them trout, but they are something quite
different ; they are not like our good German trout.” They all
sat, nodding and rocking, entranced by a vision of the warm
goodness of German life, the warm goodness of German food,
and of German superiority to all non-German barbarity.

A little while later my husband and I went and had dinner
in the wagon-restaurant, which was Yugoslavian and ex-
tremely good. When we came back the business man was
telling how, sitting at his desk in his office just after the war,
he had seen the bodies of three men fall past his windows,
Spartacist snipers who had been on his roof and had been
picked off by Government troops ; how he had been ruined in
the inflation, and had even sold his dog for food ; how he had
made a fortune again, by refinancing of a prosperous industry,
but had never enjoyed it because he had always been afraid of
Bolshevism, and had worried himself ill finding the best ways
of tying it up safely ; and now he was afraid. He had spent the
last twenty-three years in a state of continuous terror. He had
been afraid of the Allies ; he had been afraid of the Spartacists ;
he had been afraid of financial catastrophe ; he had been afraid
of the Communists ; and now he was afraid of the Nazis.

Sighing deeply, he said, evidently referring to something
about which he had not spoken, " The worst of life under the
Nazis is that the private citizen hasn’t any liberty, but the
officials haven’t any authority either.” It was curious that such
a sharply critical phrase should have been coined by one whose

34 BLACK LAMB AND GREY FALCON

attitude was so purely passive ; for he had spoken of all the
forces that had tormented him as if they could not have been
opposed, any more than thunder or lightning. He seemed,
indeed, quite unpolitically minded. When he complained of the
inflation, my husband tried to console him by saying that the
suflierings he and others had undergone at that time may have
been severe, but they had at least been of immense service to
Germany ; that Helffcrich had been justified in his heroic plan,
since it had wiped out the internal debt and cleared the ground
for enterprising people to make a new and triumphant in-
dustrialism. But the business man, though he had himself
actually been one of those enterprising men, did not show any
interest in the idea. He seemed quite unused to regarding
anything that the state did as having a cause or any but the
most immediate effect.

Just then I happened to see the name of a station at which
we were stopping, and I asked my husband to look it up in a
time-table he had in his pocket, so that we might know how
late we were. And it turned out that we were very late indeed,
nearly two hours. When my husband spoke of this all the
Germans showed the greatest consternation. They realised that
this meant they would almost certainly get in to Zagreb too late
to catch the connection which would take them the twelve hours’
journey to Split, on the Dalmatian coast, and in that case they
would have to spend the night at Zagreb. It was not easy to see
why they were so greatly distressed. Both couples were staying
in Yugoslavia for some weeks and the loss of a day could not
mean much to them ; and they could draw as they liked on
their dinars in the morning. The business man’s wife was
adding another agony to the strain of the situation. For it was
still just possible that we might get to Zagreb in time to bundle
into the Split train, and she was not sure if she ought to do that,
as her husband was so tired. The necessity for making a
decision on this plan caused her real anguish ; she sat wringing
her poor red hands. To us it seemed the obvious thing that they
should simply make up their minds to stay the night, but it was
not at all obvious to them. She looked so miserable that we gave
her some biscuits, which she crammed into her mouth exactly
like an exhausted person taking a pull of brandy. The other
two had decided to stay at Zagreb, but they were hardly in a
better state. Consciousness of their own fatigue had rushed

JODRNBY 35

upon them ; they were amazed at it, they groaned and com-
plained.

I realised again that I would never understand the German
people. The misery of these travellers was purely amazing. It
was perplexing that they should have been surprised by the
lateness of the train. The journey from Berlin to Zagreb is
something like thirty hours, and no sensible person would expect
a minor train to be on time on such a route in winter, particularly
as a great part of it runs through the mountains. It also seemed
to me odd that the business man’s wife should take it as an
unforeseen horror that her husband, who had been seriously ill
and was not yet recovered, should be tired after sitting up in a
railway carriage for a day and a night. Also, if she had such an
appetite why had she not brought a tin of biscuits and some
ham ? And how was it that these two men, who had successfully
conducted commercial and industrial enterprises of some import-
ance, were so utterly incompetent in the conduct of a simple
journey ? As I watched them in complete mystification, yet
another consideration came to horrify them. “ And what the
hotels in Zagreb will be like ! ” said the manufacturer. " Pig-
sties ! Pig-sties ! ” " Oh, my poor husband ! ” moaned the
business man’s wife. “ To think he is to be uncomfortable when
he is so ill ! " I objected that the hotels in Zagreb were excel-
lent ; that I myself had stayed in an old-fashioned hotel which
was extremely comfortable and that there was a new and huge
hotel that was positively American in its luxury. But they would
not listen to me. “ But why are you going to Yugoslavia if you
think it is all so terrible?” I asked. ”Ah,” said the manu-
facturer, “ we are going to the Adriatic coast where there are
many German tourists and for that reason the hotels are good."

Then came a climactic mystification. There came along the
first Yugoslavian ticket-collector, a red-faced, ugly, amiable
Croat. The Germans all held out their tickets, and lo and
behold 1 They were all second-class. My husband and I gaped
in bewilderment. It made the campaign they had conducted
against the young man in cofiFee-and-cream clothes completely
incomprehensible and not at all pleasing. If they had been
nasty people it would have been natural enough ; but they were
not at all nasty, they loved each other, tranquillity, snow and
their national history. Nevertheless they were unabashed by the
disclosure of what my husband and I considered the most

36 BLACK LAMB AND GREY FALCON

monstrous perfidy. I realised that if I had said to them, '* You
had that young man turned out of the carriage because he had a
second-class ticket,’’ they would have nodded and said, " Yes,”
and if I had gone on and said, “ But you yourselves have only
second-class tickets,” they would not have seen that the second
statement had any bearing on the first ; and I cannot picture to
myself the mental life of people who cannot perceive that con-
nection.

But as we gaped we were plunged into yet another mystifi-
cation. The Croat ticket-collector told the Germans that they
must pay the difference between the first-class and the second-
class fares from the frontier. It amounted to very little, to only a
few marks a head. The Germans protested, on the ground that
not enough second-class carriages had been provided in Berlin,
but the Croat explained that that was not his business, nor the
Yugoslavian Railway Company’s. The German authorities
made up the train, and it was their fault if it were not properly
constituted. The Yugoslavian Railway Company simply
accepted the train, and on its line passengers must pay for the
seats they occupied. At that the manufacturer winked at him
and held out a hand to him with a bribe in it. The Croat was so
poor, his hand curved for it in spite of himself. But he explained
that he could not settle it that way, because an inspector might
come along, and he would lose his job, for on this matter the
company was really strict. The manufacturer persisted, smiling.

I nearly bounced out of my seat, for the ticket-collector was so
poor that he was grinning with desire for the money, while his
eyebrows were going up in fear. It was not fair to tempt him to
take this risk. I also wondered why these people, who were
sure that Yugoslavia was a land of barbarians, dared put them-
selves on the wrong side of the law within a few hours of crossing
the frontier.

As I wondered, the ticket-collector suddenly lost his temper.
His red face became violet, he began to shout. The Germans
showed no resentment and simply began to get the money
together ; yet if anybody had shouted at me like that, I should
have shouted back, no matter how much in the wrong I was.
In this they showed a marked superiority over me. But in their
efforts to make payment they became again flatly incomprehen-
sible. They could pay it in marks, and the amount was much
less than the marks they had been allowed to take out of the

JOURNEY 37

country, and had in fact taken. Nevertheless they had great
difficulty in paying, for the incredible reason that not one of
them knew exactly where his money was. They had to turn oul
pockets and bags and purses, they had to give each other change,
they had to do reckonings and correct each other, and they
groaned all the time at this inconvenience which was entirely
their own fault.

I got up and went out into the corridor. It was disconcerting
to be rushing through the night with this carriageful of unhappy
muddlers, who were so nice and so incomprehensible, and so
apparently doomed to disaster of a kind so special that it was
impossible for anybody not of their blood to imagine how it
could be averted. It added to their eerie quality that on paper
these people would seem the most practical and sensible people.
Their businesses were, I am sure, most efficiently conducted.
But this only meant that since the industrial revolution capital-
ism has grooved society with a number of deep slots along
which most human beings can roll smoothly to a fixed destina-
tion. When a man takes charge of a factory the factory takes
charge of him, if he opens an office it falls into a place in a net-
work that extends over the whole world and so long as he obeys
the general trend he will not meet any obvious disaster ; but he
may be unable to meet the calls that daily life outside this
specialist area makes on judgment and initiative. These people
fell into that category. Their helplessness was the greater
because they had plainly a special talent for obedience. In the
routine level of commerce and industry they must have known a
success which must have made their failure in all other phases
of their being embittering and strange. Now that capitalism
was passing into a decadent phase and many of the grooves
along which they had rolled so happily were worn down to
nothing, they were broken and beaten, and their ability to
choose the broad outlines of their daily lives, to make political
decisions, was now less than it had been originally. It was
inevitable that the children of such muddlers, who would them-
selves be muddlers, would support any system which offered
them new opportunities for profitable obedience, which would
pattern society with new grooves in place of the old, and would
never be warned by any instinct for competence and self-pre-
servation if that system was leading to universal disaster. I
tried to tell myself that these people in the carriage were not of

VOL. 1 D

38 BLACK LAMB AND GREY FALCON

importance, and were not typical, but I knew that I lied. These
were exactly like all Aryan Germans I had ever known ; and
there were sixty millions of them in the middle of Europe.

" This is Zagreb ! ” cried the Germans, and took all their
iuEE^ge down from the racks. Then they broke into excessive
cries of exasperation and distress because it was not Zagreb, it
was Zagreb-Sava, a suburb three or four miles out of the main
town. I leaned out of the window. Rain was falling heavily,
and the mud shone between the railway tracks. An elderly
man, his thin body clad in a tight-fitting, fiimsy overcoat, trotted
along beside the train, crying softly, “ Anna ! Anna 1 Anna 1 ”
He held an open umbrella not over himself but at arm’s length.
He had not brought it for himself, but for the beloved woman he
was calling. He did not lose hope when he found her nowhere
in all the long train, but turned and trotted all the way back,
calling still with anxious sw-eetness, " Anna ! Anna I Anna I "
When the train steamed out he was trotting along it for a third
time, holding his umbrella still further away from him. A ray
of light from an electric standard shone on his white hair, on the
dome of his umbrella, which was streaked with several rents,
and on the strong spears of the driving rain. I was among
people I could understand.

CROATIA

''W''W''W''*0sr'W''W''W''

Zagreb I

They were waiting in the rain on the platform of the real
Zagrebj our three friends. There was Constantine, the
poet, a Serb, that is to say a Slav member of the Orthodox
Church, from Serbia. There was Valetta, a lecturer in Mathe-
matics at Zagreb University, a Croat, that is to say a Slav
member of the Roman Catholic Church, from Dalmatia. There
was Marko Gregorievitch, the critic and journalist, a Croat from
Croatia. They were all different sizes and shapes, in body
and mind.

Constantine is short and fat, with a head like the best-known
Satyr in the Louvre, and an air of vine-leaves about the brow,
though he drinks little. He is perpetually drunk on what comes
out of his mouth, not what goes into it. He talks incessantly.
In the morning he comes out of his bedroom in the middle of a
sentence ; and at night he backs into it, so that he can just
finish one more sentence. Automatically he makes silencing
gestures while he speaks, just in case somebody should take
it into his head to interrupt Nearly all his talk is good, and
sometimes it runs along in a coloured shadow show, like Heine’s
Florentine Nights, and sometimes it crystallises into a little
story the essence of hope or love or regret, like a Heine lyric.
Of all human beings I have ever met he is the most like Heine :
and since Heine was the most Jewish of writers it follows that
Constantine is Jew as well as Serb. His father was a Jewish
doctor of revolutionary sympathies, who fled from Russian
Poland about fifty years ago and settled in a rich provincial town
in Serbia and became one of the leaders of the medical profes-
sion, which has always been more advanced there than one

40 BLACK LAMB AND GREY FALCON

might have supposed. His mother was also a Polish Jewess,
and was a famous musician. He is by adoption only, yet quite
completely, a Serb. He fought in the Great War very gallantly,
for he is a man of great physical courage, and to him Serbian
history is his history, his life is a part of the life of the Serbian
people. He is now a Government official ; but that is not the
reason why he believes in Yugoslavia. To him a state of Serbs,
Slovenes and Croats, controlled by a central government in
Belgrade, is a necessity if these peoples were to maintain them-
selves against Italian and Central European pressure on the
west, and Bulgarian pressure, which might become in effect
Central European pressure, in the east.

Valetta comes from a Dalmatian town which was settled by
the Greeks some hundreds of years before Christ, and he has the
strong delicacy and the morning freshness of an archaic statue.
They like him everywhere he goes, Paris and London and
Berlin and Vienna, but he is hall-marked as a Slav, because his
charm is not associated with any of those defects that commonly
go with it in other races. He might suddenly stop smiling and
clench his long hands, and offer himself up to martyrdom for an
idea. He is anti- Yugoslavian ; he is a federalist and believes in
an autonomous Croatia.

Gregorievitch looks like Pluto in the Mickey Mouse films.
His face is grooved with grief at the trouble and lack of gratitude
he has encountered while defending certain fixed and noble
standards in a chaotic world. His long body is like Pluto’s in its
extensibility. As he sits in his armchair, resentment at what he
conceives to be a remediable injustice will draw him inches
nearer to the ceiling, despair at an inevitable wrong will crumple
him up like a concertina. Yugoslavia is the Mickey Mouse this
Pluto serves. He is ten years older than Constantine, who is
forty-six, and thirty years older than Valetta. This means that
for sixteen years before the war he was an active revolutionary,
fighting against the Hungarians for the right of Croats to govern
themselves and to use their own language. In order that the
Croats might be united with their free brother Slavs the Serbs,
he endured poverty and imprisonment and exile. Therefore
Yugoslavia is to him the Kingdom of Heaven on earth. Who
speaks more lightly of it spits on those sixteen years of sorrow,
who raises his hand against it violates the Slav sacrament. So
to him Constantine, who was still a student in Paris when the

CROATIA ■

Great War broke out, and who had been born a free Serb, seems
impious in the way he takes Yugoslavia for granted. There is
the difference between them that there was between the Chris-
tians of the first three centuries, who fought for their faith when
it seemed a lost cause, and the Christians of the fourth century
who fought for it when it was victorious.

And to Gregorievitch Valetta is quite simply a traitor. He
is more than an individual who has gone astray, he is the very
essence of treachery incarnate. Youth should uphold the banner
of the right against unjust authority, and should practise that
form of obedience to God which is rebellion against tyranny ;
and it seems to Gregorievitch that Valetta is betraying that
ideal, for to him Yugoslavia represents a supreme gesture of
defiance against the tyranny of the Austro-Hungarian Empire.
Only a sorcerer could make him realise that the Austro-Hun-
garian Empire ceased to be when Valetta was six years old, and
that he has never known any other symbol of unjust authority
exeept Yugoslavia.

They are standing in the rain, and they are all different and
they are all the same. They greet us warmly, and in their
hearts they cannot greet each other, and they dislike us a little
because it is to meet us that they are standing beside their
enemies in the rain. We are their friends, but we are made
from another substance. The rich passions of Constantine, the
intense, graceful, selected joys and sorrows of Valetta, and
Gregorievitch 's gloomy Great Danish nobility, are all cut from
the same primary stuff, though in very dissimilar shapes.
Sitting in our hotel room, drinking wine, they showed their
unity of origin. A door opens, they twitch and swivel their
heads, and the movement is the same. When these enemies
advance on each other, they must move at the same tempo.

My husband has not met any of them before. I see him
transfixed by their strangeness. He listens amazed to Con-
stantine’s beautiful French, which has preserved in it all the
butterfly brilliances of his youth, when he was one of Bergson’s
favourite students, and was making his musical studies with
Wanda Landowska. He falls under the spell of Constantine.
He strains forward to catch the perfect phrase that is bound to
come when Constantine’s eyes catch the light, and each of his
tight black curls spins on his head, and his lips shoot out hori-
zontally, and his hands grope in the air before him as if he were

43 BLACK LAMB AND GREY FALCON

unloosing the neckcloth of the strangling truth. Now Con-
stantine was talking of Bergson and saying that it was to miss
the very essence in him to regard him only as a philosopher.
He was a magician who had taken philosophy as his subject
matter. He did not analyse phenomena, he uttered incantations
that invoked understanding. " We students," said Constantine,
" we were not the pupils of a great professor, we were the
sorcerer’s apprentices. We did strange things that are not in
most academic courses. On Sundays we would talk together
in the forest of Fontainebleau, all day long sometimes, recon-
stituting his lectures by pooling our memories. For, you see,
in his class-room it was not possible to take notes. If we bent
our heads for one moment to take down a point, we missed an
organic phrase, and the rest of the lecture appeared incompre-
hensible. That shows he was a magician. For what is the
essential of a spell ? That if one word is left out it is no longer
a spell. I was able to recognise that at once, for in my town,
which is Shabats, there were three houses in a row, and in one
house lived my father who was the greatest doctor in our
country, and in the next there lived a priest who was the greatest
saint in my country, and in the next there lived an old woman
who was the greatest witch in my country, and when I was a
little boy I lived in the first of these houses and I went as 1
would into the other two, for the holy man and the witch liked
me very much, and 1 tell you in each of these houses there was
magic, so 1 know all about it as most men do not."

A line of light ran along the dark map of Europe we all of
us hold in our minds ; at one end a Serbian town, unknown to
me as Ur, peopled with the personnel of fairy-tales, and at the
other end the familiar idea of Bergson. My husband, I could
sec, was enraptured. He loves to learn what he did not know
before. But in a minute I could see that he was not so happy.
Valctta had said that he was making plans for our pleasure in
Yugoslavia, and that he hoped that we would be able to go up
into the snow mountains, particularly if we liked winter sports.
My husband said he was very fond of Switzerland, and how he
enjoyed going over there when he was tired and handing himself
over to the care of the guides. " Yes, the guides are so good for
us, who are over-civilised,” said Constantine. " They refresh
us immensely, when we are with them. For they succeed at
every point where we fail. We can be responsible for what we

CROATIA

love, our families and our countries, and the causes we think
just, but where we do not love we cannot muster the necessary
attention. That is just what the glides do, with such a wealth
of attention that it amounts to nothing comparable to our
attention at all, to a mystical apprehension of the whole universe.

" I will give you,” he said, “ an example. I made once a
most beautiful journey in Italy with my wife. She is a German,
you know, and she worships Goethe, so this was a pilgrimage.
We went to see where he had lived in Venice and Rome, and
she was so delighted, you cannot believe, delighted deep in
herself, so that her intuition told her many things. ‘ That is the
house where he lived ! ’ she cried in Venice, jumping up and
down in the gondola, and it was so. At length we came to
Naples, and we took a guide and went up Vesuvius, because
Goethe went up Vesuvius. Do you remember the passage where
he says he was on the edge of a little crater, and he slipped ?
That was much in my wife’s mind, and suddenly it was given
to her to know by intuition that a certain little crater we saw
was that same one where Goethe had slipped, so before we could
stop it she ran down to it. I saw, of course, that she might be
killed at any moment, so I ran after her. But so did the guide,
though she was nothing to him. And then came the evidence of
this mystic apprehension which is given by the constant vigilance
of a guide’s life. Just then this crater began to erupt, and the
lava burst out here and there and here. But always the guide
knew where it was coming, and took us to the left or the right,
wherever it was not. Sometimes there was barely time for us
to be there for more than a second ; that was proved afterwards
because the soles of our shoes were scorched. For three-
quarters of an hour we ran thus up and down, from right to
left and from left to right, before we could get to safety ; and
I was immensely happy the whole time because the guide was
doing something I could not have done, which it is good to do ! ”

During the telling of this story my husband’s eyes rested on
me with an expression of alarm. It was apparent from Con-
stantine’s tone that nothing in the story had struck him as odd
except the devotion of the guide to his charges. “ Are not her
friends very dotty ? ” he was plainly asking himself. " Is this
how she wants to live ? ” But the conversation took a business-
like turn, and we were called on to consider our plans. We
must meet So-and-so and Such-and-such, of course. It became

BLACK LAMB AND GREY FALCON

obvious from certain reticence that the strained relations
between Croats and Serbs were making themselves felt over our
plans. For So-and-so, it appeared, would not meet Such-and-
such, and that, it could be deduced, was the reason. Suddenly
such reticences were blown away by a very explicit wrangle
about Y., the editor of a certain newspaper. " Oh, you should
meet him, he would interest you,’’ said Valetta. “ Yes, he has
a very remarkable mind,” admitted Constantine. “ No,”
exploded Gregorievitch. They squabbled for a time in Serbian.
Then Gregorievitch shrugged his shoulders and said to us, with
heavy lightness, " Y. is not an honest man, that is all I ” “ He
is perfectly honest,” said Valetta coldly. " Gregorievitch, you
are an impossibilist,” said Constantine mildly. " Let our
English guests judge,” said Pluto grimly.

It appeared that one day some years before Pluto had rung
up Y. and reminded him that it w'as the next week the centenary
of a certain Croat poet, and asked him if he would like an article
on him. Y. said that he would, and Pluto sent an article four
columns long, including two quotations concerning liberty.
But the article had to be submitted to the censor, who at that
particular time and in that particular place happened to be
Pluto. He sent it back to Y. cut by a column and a half, includ-
ing both quotations. Then, if we would believe it, Y. had rung
up Pluto on the telephone and been most abusive, and never
since then had he accepted one single article from Pluto.
” Surely,” said Pluto, immensely tall and grey and wrinkled,
” he must have seen that I had to do what I did. To be true to
myself as a critic I had to write the article as I did. But to be
true to myself as a censor, I had to cut it as I did. In which
capacity did he hope that I would betray my ideals ? ” As he
related this anecdote his spectacles shone with the steady glare
of a strong man justly enraged.

But that story I could understand. It proceeds not, as might
be thought, from incoherence but from a very high and too rigid
sense of order. There lingers here a survival of an old attitude
towards status that the whole world held, in days which were
perhaps happier. Now, we think that if a man takes an office,
he will modify it according to what he is as a man, according to
his temperament and official standards. But then it was taken
for granted that a man would modify his temperament and his
ethical standards according to his office, provided it were of

CROATIA

any real importance. In the third and fourth centuries Christian
congregations were constantly insisting on electing people as
bishops who were unwilling to accept the office, perhaps for
some such valid reason as that they were not even Christians,
but who seemed to have the ability necessary for the semi-
magisterial duties of the episcopacy. Sometimes these men were
so reluctant that the congregation were obliged to kidnap them
and ordain them forcibly. But once they were installed as
Bishops, they often performed their duties admirably. They
had a sense of social structure, they were aware that bishops,
who had by then taken over most of the civil administration
that the crumbling Roman Empire could no longer handle,
must work well if society was not to fall to pieces. Even so
Gregorievitch must have been conscious, all his life, of the social
value of patriotic poets, and, for the last unhappy twenty years,
of censors. Therefore it seemed to him that he must do his
best in both capacities, not that he should modify his perform-
ances to uphold the consistence of his personality. That I could
perfectly understand ; but it was so late I did not feel able to
explain it to my husband, whom I saw when I forced open my
eyelids, undressing slowly, with his eyes set pensively on the
window-curtains, wondering what strange city they were going
to disclose next day.

Zagreb II

But the morning show'ed us that Zagreb w'as not a strange
city at all. It has the warm and comfortable appearance of a
town that has been well-aired. People have been living there in
physical, though not political, comfort for a thousand years.
Moreover it is full of those vast toast-coloured buildings, barracks
and law courts and municipal offices, which are an invariable
sign of past occupancy by the Austro-Hungarian Empire ; and
that always means enthusiastic ingestion combined with lack
of exercise in pleasant surroundings, the happy consumption of
coffee and whipped cream and sweet cakes at little tables under
chestnut trees. But it had its own quality. It has no grand
river, it is built up to no climax ; the hill the old town stands
on is what the eighteenth century used to call “ a moderate
elevation ”. It has few very fine buildings except the Gothic
Cathedral, and that has been forced to wear an ugly nineteenth-

46 BLACK LAMB AND GREY FALCON

century overcoat. But Zagfreb makes from its featureless hand-
someness something that pleases like a Schubert song, a delight
that begins quietly and never definitely ends. We believed we
were being annoyed by the rain that first morning we walked
out into it, but eventually we recognised we were as happy as
if we had been walking in sunshine through a really beautiful
city. It has, moreover, the endearing characteristic noticeable
in many French towns, of remaining a small town when it is in
fact quite large. A hundred and fifty thousand people live in
Zagreb, but from the way gossips stand in the street, it is plain
that everybody knows who is going to have a baby and when.
This is a lovely spiritual victory over urbanisation.

There was a wide market-place, where under red and white
umbrellas peasants stood sturdy and square on their feet, and
amazed us by their faces, which are as mobile and sensitive as
if they were the most cultivated townspeople. The women wore —
and were the first to do so I have ever seen anywhere in the
world — neither skirt nor trousers, but two broad aprons, one
covering the front part of the body and one the back, and over-
lapping at the sides ; and underneath showed very brave red
woollen stockings. They gave the sense of the very opposite of
what we mean by the word “ peasant ” when we use it in a
derogatory sense, thinking of women made doltish by repeated
pregnancies and a lifetime spent in the service of oafs in villages
that swim in mud to the thresholds every winter. This costume
was evolved by w'omen who could stride along if they were
eight months gone with child, and who would dance in the mud
if they felt like it, no matter w'hat any oaf said.

They lived under no favour, however. They all spoke some
German, so we were able to ask the prices of what they sold ;
and we covdd have bought a sackful of fruit and vegetables, all
of the finest, for the equivalent of two shillings ; a fifth of what
it would have fetched in a Western city. This meant desperate,
pinching poverty, for the manufactured goods in the shops are
marked at nearly Western prices. But they looked gallant, and
nobody spoke of poverty, nobody begged. It was a sign that
we were out of Central Europe, for in a German and Austrian
town where the people were twice as well-off as these they would
have perpetually complained. But there were signs that we
were near Central Europe. There were stalls covered with fine
embroidered handkerchiefs and table linen, which was all of

CROATIA

it superbly executed, for Slav women have a captive devil in
their flying fingers to work wonders for them. But the design
was horrible. It was not like the designs I had seen in other
parts of Yugoslavia, in Serbia and Macedonia ; it was not even
as good as the designs on the dresses of the peasant women who
were standing by the stalls, inferior though they were. It was
severely naturalistic, and attempted to represent fruit and
flowers, and it followed the tradition of Victorian Berlin wool-
work. In other words, it showed German influence.

I felt impatient. 1 was getting no exhilaration out of being
here, such as I had hoped for in coming to Yugoslavia. For a
rest I went and stood on the steps of the statue in the middle of
the square. Looking at the inscription I saw that it was a
statue of the Croat patriot, Yellatchitch, and I reflected that if
the Croats had not succeeded in cheering me up they had other
achievements to their credit. For this is one of the strangest
statues in the world. It represents Yellatchitch as leading his
troops on horseback and brandishing a sword in the direction
of Budapest, in which direction he had indeed led them to
victory against the Hungarians in 1848 ; and this is not a new
statue erected sfnce Croatia was liberated from Hungary. It
stood in the market-place, commemorating a Hungarian defeat,
in the days when Hungary was master of Croatia, and the ex-
planation does not lie in Hungarian magnanimity. It takes the
whole of Croatian history to solve the mystery.

The Croats were originally a Slav tribe who were invited by
the Emperor Heraclius to free the Dalmatian coast and the
Croatian hinterland from the Avars, one of the most noxious
pillaging hordes who operated from a centre on the Danube
far and wide : they created an early currency crisis by collecting
immense tributes in gold, year after year, from all surrounding
peoples. That was well on into the decadence of the Western
Roman Empire, in the seventh century. They then stayed on
as vassals of the Empire, and when its power dissolved they
declared themselves independent ; and they had their own kings
who acknowledged the suzerainty of the Pope. Very little is
known about them in those days, except that they were not a
barbarous people, but had inherited much of the elaborate
Byzantine ritual. The last of their kings was crowned about the
time of the Norman Conquest. He left no kin, and civil war
followed among the Croat nobles. For the sake of peace they

48 BLACK LAMB AND GREY FALCON

recognised as their sovereign Coloman, King of Hungary, who
asserted the triple claim of conquest, election and inheritance ;
the last was doubtful, but the other two were fair enough. It
is a thing to be noted, the age of legalism in these parts. It is
our weakness to think that distant people became civilised when
we looked at them, that in their yesterdays they were brutish.

Coloman was crowned Rex Hungariae Croatiae atque Dal-
matiae. For two centuries the two kingdoms led an independent
and co-equal existence under the same crown. Their peoples
were not likely to assimilate. They were racially unrelated :
the Hungarians or Magyars are a people of far Asiatic origin,
akin to the Finns, the Bulgars and the Turks, and the Croats
are Slav, akin to the Serbs, the Russians, the Poles and the
Czechs. Neither is meek ; each is passionately attached to his
own language ; and the Hungarians are fierce and warlike
romantics whereas the Croats are fierce and warlike intellectuals.
Nothing could make them sympathetic, but their position in
Central Europe made the close alliance of a dual monarchy
desirable. But it was not cast-iron. In the fourteenth century
Coloman’s line died out, and the Croats would not accept the
king elected by the Hungarians but crowned their own choice
in Zagreb Cathedral, and the union was only restored after six
years, when the Hungarians accepted the Croat king. But the
son of that king was Louis the Great, and he was predominantly
Hungarian in blood and more in feeling. The Croats had to
take a second place.

Many of us think that monarchy is more stable than a re-
publican form of government, and that there is a special whim-
sicality about modern democracies. We forget that stable
monarchies are the signs of genius of an order at least as rare
in government as in literature or music, or of stable history.
Monarchy without these conditions is whimsical to the point
of mania. The stock was not fruitful as among commoners,
perhaps because princesses were snatched as brides before
puberty lest others make the useful alliance first ; and in no
rank does stock breed true and merit follow merit. If on a
king’s death he should leave an idiot heir or none, the nobles
would send, perhaps far away, to a man whose fame lay in
violence, in order to avoid war among themselves. He would
rule them with the coldness of an alien, and it might be that in
his loins there was working this genetic treachery, to leave them

CROATIA

masterless at his death. He was in any case sure to be afflicted
with the special malady of kings, which was poverty ; the re-
luctance we feel about paying income tax is only the modem
expression of a human incapacity to see the justice of providing
for corporate expenses which is as old as the species itself.
Here his alien blood made itself felt. Terrified of his insecure
position in a strange land, he asked little of the nobles and came
down like a scourge on the peasants, and was tempted to plunder
them beyond need and without mercy. That is to say, he
demanded certain sums from the nobles and made no provisions
for social justice which prevented the nobles from wringing them
out of the peasants and keeping their private treasures intact.
There was the still graver danger that the king’s alien blood
would let him make contracts to their disadvantage with foreign
powers. This danger was very grave indeed. For though there
is a popular belief that negotiations to take the place of warfare
are a modern invention, nothing could be further from the truth.
The Middle Ages were always ready to lay down the sword and
sign an agreement, preferably for a cash payment. An alien
king was always particularly likely to sell a slice of his lands and
people for a sum that would shore up his authority.

It is not comfortable to be an inhabitant of this globe. It
never has been, except for brief periods. The Croats have been
peculiarly uncomfortable. Louis the Great was a Frenchman,
one of the house of Anjou ; he married Elizabeth, a Slav, the
daughter of a Bosnian king. When Louis died he left two
daughters, and nearly all Hungary and Dalmatia recognised as
their queen the elder, Mary, who was to govern under the Re-
gency of her mother. But certain Croatian and Hungarian
barons were against her, and called to the throne her father’s
cousin. King Charles of Naples. It is to be noted that these
Croatian barons were a strange and ungodly lot, with so little
care for their people, and indeed, so little resemblance to them
that they might be guessed to be alien. This whole territory
had been devastated again and again by Asiatic invaders, and
it is supposed that many of these nobles were the descendants
of various roving brigands, men of power, who had seized land
from the exhausted population as the invaders receded : some
of them were certainly by origin Italian, German and Goth, and
in some cases themselves Asiatic. King Charles was crowned
King of Hungary and Croatia, and four years afterwards was

BLACK LAMB AND GREY FALCON

assassinated by the widow Elizabeth. He was succeeded by
his son, Ladislas, a fantastical adventurer. He was faced by
Elizabeth and her daughter, Mary, and her betrothed, another
alien, Sigismond of Luxemburg, a son of the Emperor Charles
of Germany, for whom they desired the crown. Thereafter for
fifty years the country agonised under these aliens, who were,
however, inevitable at this phase of history. The people screamed
with pain. They were tortured, imprisoned, famined ; and
their national soul was violated. Ladislas, though he had never
been crowned, sold Dalmatia to the Republic of Venice for a
hundred thousand ducats ; and though Sigismond was eventu-
ally crowned, he was never in a position to assert his legal rights
and recover his possessions. This meant that an enormous
number of warlike, thriftless, bucolic intellectuals fell under the
control of a community of merchants ; and that the Croats of
Croatia were thereafter the more helpless against Hungary by
this division from their Dalmatian brothers.

Sigismond bore the Croats a grudge, because certain of their
nobles had aided Ladislas against him. There was then and
thereafter no separate coronation for Croatia. She had to be
satisfied with a separate diploma inaugurale, a document setting
forth the king’s oath to his subjects and the privileges he intended
to give them. But it is to be observed that she had to be satisfied.
Dismembered as she was, she still had enough military power
to make her able to bargain. Only as time went on these things
mattered less. From the south-east the Turks pressed on and
on. In 1453 they took Constantinople. In 1468 they were
threatening the Dalmatian coast. Thereafter the Croats and the
Hungarians were engaged in a perpetual guerilla warfare to
defend their lands. In 1526 the Hungarians fought the Turks
in the battle of Mohacs, without calling on the Croats for aid,
out of pride and political cantankerousness among the nobles.
They were beaten and the king killed. Now Croatia was quite
alone. It had to fall back on Austria, which was then governed
by Ferdinand of Hapsburg, and it offered him the throne on a
hereditary basis.

The Germans have always hated the Slavs. More than that,
they have always acted hatef^ully towards them. Now the Croats
began to learn this lesson. Croatia was ruined economically,
because the Turks were to its north-east, its east and its south-
east, so it was at Austria’s mercy. Austria used her power

CROATIA

to turn them into the famous Military Confines, where the whole
male population between the- ages of sixteen and sixty were
treated as a standing army to defend the Austrian Empire.
They were given certain privileges which were chiefly legal
Actions ; but for the very reason that they were isolated from
the rest of Europe they lingered in the legalistic Middle Ages
and enjoyed these Actions. They were sunk in wretched poverty.
At the end of the sixteenth century there was a Peasants’ Rising,
which was suppressed with the greatest cruelty conceivable.
The leader was killed at a mock coronation. The crown set on
his head was of white-hot iron. Thereafter, between Austrian
tyranny and Turkish raids, the Croats lived submissively, until
1670 when a number of the Croat nobles formed a conspiracy
against the Hapsburgs. It is curious to note that these aliens,
noted before for their indifference to the interests of their people,
had in the years of misfortune grown truly nationalist. They
were discovered and beheaded ; and their lands were given to
Austrian and Italian families, to whom the peasants were simply
brute beasts for exploitation.

Meanwhile there developed among the Croats one of the
most peculiar passions known in histoi y : a burning indestruct-
ible devotion to the Hapsburgs. Because of the historic union
with Hungary they sent their Ban, which is to say their Governor,
to sit in the Hungarian Diet, while it sat in exile and when, on
its return, it sat again in Bratislavia and later in Budapest. But
they had their independence ; they ratiAed separate treaties,
and nobody said them nay. They used this power to put the
Hapsburgs Armly on the throne. When Charles VI had no son
he put forward the Pragmatic Sanction, which declared that the
house of Hapsburg could inherit through the female line, and
gave the succession to his daughter Maria Theresa. If this had
been resisted by the highly militarised state of Croatia other
parts of the Empire might have followed suit ; but the Croats
eagerly accepted. They received a characteristic return. The
aristocracy of Hungary was lawless and disobedient, after a
hundred and Afty years of demoralisation under Turkish rule.
Maria Theresa tore up the constitution to please them, and put
Croatia under them as a slave state : not as regnum socium, not
as a companion state, but as partes adnexae, annexed territory.
Since the Croatian nobles had been destroyed there was now
nobody to lead a revolt. The imported aristocracy felt a far

52 BLACK LAMB AND GREY FALCON

greater kinship with the Hungarians of their own class than
with the peasants on their lands.

So the eighteenth century went by with the Croats enslaved
by Hungary, and their passion for Austria idiotically stable.
The increasing incapacity of the Hapsburgs led to the crisis of
1848. Among other follies Francis the First and Metternich
had the unhappy idea of closing the Hungarian Diet for fourteen
years, an oppressive act which had raised Hungarian national
feeling to fever point. It oddly happened that inherent in Hun-
garian nationalism was a contempt and loathing for all nationalist
sentiments felt by any other people in all conceivable circum-
stances. This was proved later by their strange attitude to the
language issue. It infuriated them that they should be forced
to speak German and should not be allowed to speak their own
language, Magyar ; but they were revolted by the idea that any
of their neighbours, the Croats, Serbs or Slovaks, should speak
their own language, or indeed anything but Magyar. The
famous Hungarian patriot, Lajos Kossuth, showed vehemence
on this point that was simply not sane, considering he had not
one drop of Hungarian blood in his veins and was purely Slovak.
When he took charge of the Nationalist Party he announced it
as part of his programme to destroy the identity of Croatia. He
declared he would suppress the Croatian language by the sword,
and introduced an electoral bill which omitted the name of
Croatia and described her departments as Hungarian counties.

The Croats showed their love and trust in Austria once more.
They sent a deputation to Vienna to ask the Emperor Ferdinand
for divorce from Hungary and direct subordination to the Haps-
burgs, and to suggest that a young officer named Yellatchitch
should be appointed Ban of Croatia. The Emperor behaved
with the fluttering inefficiency of the German tourists on the
train. He was on the eve of a cataclysm in European history.
He was surrounded by revolutionary Viennese, by discontented
Czechs, by disloyal Hungarians ; the only faithful subjects
within sight were the Croats. But he hesitated to grant the
deputation its requests, and indeed would have refused them
had it not been that certain persons in court circles had taken a
liking to Yellatchitch. After Yellatchitch was appointed he
spent six months in organising anti-Hungarian feeling through-
out Croatia, and then in September 1 848 he marched across the
frontier at the head of fifty thousand Croat soldiers and defeated

CROATIA

a Hungarian army that was hurrying to Austria to aid the
Viennese revolutionaries against the Hapsburgs. Nobody has
ever said that the Hungarians were not magnificent fighters, but
this time the Croats were at least as good, and they had the
advantage of meeting an adversary under an insane leader.
They did not even have to go on holding the Hungarians at bay,
for Kossuth was inspired to the supreme idiocy of formally
announcing that the Hapsburgs were deposed and that he was
ruler of Hungary. Up till then the programme of the revolu-
tionaries had simply been autonomy within the Austrian Empire.
This extension meant that Russia felt bound to intervene. Those
who fear Bolshevist Russia because of its interventions in the
affairs of other countries, which are so insignificant that they
have never been rewarded with success, forget that Tsarist
Russia carried foreign intervention to a pitch that has never
been equalled by any other power, except the modern Fascist
states, and that she held it as her right to defend the dynastic
principle wherever it was threatened. Kossuth’s proclamation
meant that the Tsar immediately poured a hundred and eighty
thousand Russians into Hungary. By summer-time in 1849
Kossuth was a fugitive in Turkey.

Yellatchiteh and the Croats had saved the Austrian Empire.
They got exactly nothing for this service, except this statue
which stands in Zagreb market-square. The Hapsburgs were
still suicidal. They were bent on procuring the dissolution of
their Empire, on raping time and begetting on her the Sarajevo
assassination. Instead of giving the Croats the autonomy they
demanded they now made them wholly subject to the central
government, and they freed them from Magyarisation to inflict
on them the equal brutality of Germanisation. And then,
ultimately, they practised on them the supreme treachery. When
the Dual Monarchy was framed to placate Hungary, the Croats
were handed over to the Hungarians as their chattels. I do not
know of any nastier act than this in history.* It has a kind of
lowness that is sometimes exhibited in the sexual affairs of very
vulgar and shameless people : a man leaves his wife and induces
a girl to become his mistress, then is reconciled to his wife and
to please her exposes the girl to some public humiliation. But,
all the same, Austria did not forget 1848 and Lajos Kossuth.
It left the statue there, just as a reminder. So the Croat helots
' It must be remembered that this journal was written in 1937.

VOL. I E

BLACK LAMB AND GREY FALCON

stood and touched their caps to their Hungarian masters in the
shadow of the memorial of the Croat General who led them to
victory against a Hungarian army. That is the strangest episode
of sovereignty I have ever chanced upon in any land.

Well, what did all this story mean to the people in Croatia,
the people I was looking at, the people who had been selling me
things ? 1 had come to Yugoslavia because I knew that the past
has made the present, and I want to see how the process works.
Let me start now. It is plain that it means an amount of human
pain, arranged in an unbroken continuity appalling to any
person cradled in the security of the English or American past.
Were I to go down into the market-place, armed with the powers
of witchcraft, and take a peasant by the shoulders and whisper
to him, “ In your lifetime, have you known peace ? ’’ wait for
his answer, shake his shoulders and transform him into his
father, and ask him the same question, and transform him in his
turn to his father, I would never hear the word " Yes,” if I
carried my questioning of the dead back for a thousand years.
I would always hear, " No, there was fear, there were our enemies
without, our rulers within, there was prison, there was torture,
there was violent death.”

And they had no compensation in their history, for that never
once formed a historic legend of any splendid magnitude. It
was a record of individual heroism that no nation could surpass,
but it had never shaped itself into an indestructible image of
triumph that could be turned to as an escape from present
failure. The Croats have always been superb soldiers ; but their
greatest achievements have been merged in the general triumphs
of the armies of the Hapsburgs, who were at pains that they
should never be extricated and distinguished, and their courage
and endurance was shown most prodigious in engagements with
the Turks which were too numerous and too indecisive to be
named in history or even preserved with any vividness in local
tradition. Their only outstanding military victory to their credit
was the rout of the Hungarians commemorated by Yellatchitch’s
statue, and this might as welt have been a defeat. Again we
must go for an analogy to the sexual affairs of individuals. As
we grow older and see the ends of stories as well as their be-
ginnings, we realise that to the people who take part in them
it is almost of greater importance that they should be stories,
that they should form a recognisable pattern, than that they

CROATIA

Bhould be happy or tragic. The men and women who are
withered by their fates, who go down to death reluctantly but
without noticeable regrets for life, are not those who have lost
their mates prematurely or by perfidy, or who have lost battles
or fallen from early promise in circumstances of public shame,
but those who have been jilted or the victims of impotent lovers,
who have never been summoned to command or been given any
opportunity for success or failure. Art is not a plaything, but a
necessity, and its essence, form, is not a decorative adjustment,
but a cup into which life can be poured and lifted to the lips and
be tasted. If one's own existence has no form, if its events do
not come handily to mind and disclose their significance, we
feel about ourselves as if we were reading a bad book. We can
all of us judge the truth of this, for hardly any of us manage to
avoid some periods when the main theme of our lives is obscured
by details, when we involve ourselves with persons who are in-
sufficiently characterised ; and it is possibly true not only of
individuals, but of nations. What would England be like if it
had not its immense Valhalla of kings and heroes, if it had not
its Elizabethan and its Victorian ages, its thousands of incidents
which come up in the mind, simple as icons and as miraculous
in their suggestion that what England has been it can be again,
now and for ever ? What would the United States be like if it
had not those reservoirs of triumphant will-power, the historical
facts of the War of Independence, of the giant American states-
men, and of the pioneering progress into the West, which every
American citizen has at his mental command and into which he
can plunge for revivification at any minute ? To have a difficult
history makes, perhaps, a people who are bound to be difficult
in any conditions, lacking these means of refreshment. " But
perhaps,” said my husband, " it does not matter very much."

Zagreh III

But it matters. He saw, before we went to bed that night,
that what happened to these people matters a great deal. As
we stood on the steps of the statue there came towards us Con-
stantine, treading delicately among the pigeons that cover all
the pavement in the market-square where there are not stalls.
He brought his brows together in censure of two of these pigeons

56 BLACK LAMB AND GREY FALCON

which, in spite of the whirling traffic all around them, had felt
the necessity to love. "A h. Us Croates ! ” he mtirmured, shaking
his head ; and as we laughed he went on, “ And I can see that
you two also are thinking of committing a misdemeanour of
taste. Not so gross, but still a misdemeanour. You are think-
ing of going up to look at the Old Town, and that is quite wrong.
Up there are villas and palaces, which must not be seen in the
morning. In the evening, when the dusk is sentimental, we shall
go and peer through the gateways and you shall see colonnades
and pediments more remote than those of Rome, because they
are built in the neo-classical style that was the mode in Vienna
a hundred to a hundred and fifty years ago, and you shall see
our little Slav contribution, for in the walled garden before the
bouse we will see iron chairs and tables with nobody sitting at
them, and you will recognise at a glance that the person who is
not sitting there is straight out of Turgeniev. You cannot look
at Austria as it was the day before yesterday, at us Slavs as we
were yesterday, by broad daylight. It is like the pigeons. But
come to the Cathedral, which is so beautiful that you may see it
now or any other time.”

So we went up the steep street into the Cathedral Square, and
looked for a time at the Archbishop’s palace, with its squat round
towers under their candle-extinguisher tops, and then went
through the Cathedral’s nineteenth-century false front into the
dark and stony plant forms of the Gothic interior. It has been
cut about as by a country dressmaker, but it has kept the
meditative integrity of darkness considering light, the mathe-
matical aspiration for something above mathematics, which had
been the core of its original design, and at that moment it housed
the same intense faith that had built it. This was Easter Eve ;
the great cross had been taken down from the altar and lay
propped up before the step, the livid and wounded Christ
wincing in the light of the candles set at His feet. It was guarded
by two soldiers in the olive uniform of the Yugoslavian Army,
who leaned on their rifles as if this was a dead king of earth
lying in state. As I looked at them, admiring the unity enjoyed
by a state which fights and believes it has a moral right to fight,
and w'ould give up either fighting or religion if it felt the two
inconsistent, I saw that they W'cre moved by a deep emotion.
Their lips were drawn outward from their clenched teeth, they
were green as if they were seasick. “ Are they tired ? Do

CROATIA

they have to guard the cross for a long time ? " I asked cauti-
ously. “ No,” said Constantine, “ not for more than an hour
or two. Then others come.” “ Then they are really looking
like that,” I pressed, ” because it is a great thing for them to
guard the dead Christ ? ” “ Certainly,” he replied. “ The

Croats are such Catholics as you never did see, not in France,
not in Italy ; and I think you ask that question because you do
not understand the Slavs. If we did not feel intensely about
guarding the dead Christ we should not put our soldiers to do
it, and indeed they would not do it if we put them there, they
would go away and do something else. The custom would have
died if it had not meant a great deal to us.” For a long time
we watched the wincing Christ and the two boys with bowed
heads, who swayed very slightly backwards and forwards, back-
wards and forwards, like candle-flame in a room where the air
is nearly still. I had not been wrong. In Yugoslavia there was
an intensity of feeling that was not only of immense and ex-
hilarating force, but had an honourable origin, proceeding from
realist passion, from whole belief.

We were to learn after that something about the intellectual
level of Croatia. In a restaurant beside the Cathedral people
awaited us for lunch : a poet and playwright, author of dramas
much larger than life, larger even than art, which make Othello
seem plotless and light-minded, who looks like Mr. Pickwick,
and his wife, who had the beauty of a Burne-Jones, the same air
of having rubbed holes in her lovely cheeks with her clenched
knuckles. They looked up at us absently, said that they had
found the poems of Vaughan the Silurist in an anthology of
English poems and thought him one of the greatest poets, and,
while ordering us an immense meal of which goose-liver and
apple sauce were the centre-piece, threw over us the net of an
extremely complicated conversation about literature. “ We
think,” said the playwright, " that the greatest writers of recent
times are Joseph Conrad, Maxim Gorki and Jack London.”
We blenched. We thought that in fact these people could have
no taste, if they could think both Vaughan and Jack London
great. We were wrong. The playwright was actually a real
poet, and he did not expect anything but poetic forms to satisfy
the highest canons of art. Writers like Shaw or Wells or Peguy
or Gide did not seem to him artists at all : they wrote down
what one talks in cafes, which is quite a good thing to do if

58 BLACK LAMB AND GREY FALCON

the talk is good enough, but is not serious, because it deals
with something as common and renewable as sweat. But pure
narration was a form of great importance, because it gathered
together experiences that could be assimilated by others of
poetic talent and transmuted into higher forms ; and he liked
Conrad and Jack London and Maxim Gorki because they were
collecting experiences which were rare, which they had investi-
gated thoroughly by undergoing them themselves, and which
they had tested with an abnormal sensitiveness. But the play-
wright and his wife had been wondering whether Conrad was
not in a class alone, because of the feeling of true tragedy that
ran through his works. It never blossomed into poetry, but was
it not so definitely the proper subject matter of poetry that he
might claim to be, so to speak, on the commissariat of the poetic
army ?

" No,” said my husband suddenly, “ Conrad has no sense of
tragedy at all, but only of the inevitable, and for him the inevit-
able was never the fulfilment of a principle such as the Greek
ananke, but a deroulement of the consequences of an event.”
An example of this, he said, is the story " Duel " in A Set of Six,
in which the original event is commonplace, bringing no principle
whatsoever into play, and the inevitable consequences are so far-
reaching that they are almost ludicrous. But there is no factor
involved that might come into operation, that indeed must come
into operation so generally in human affairs that as we identify
it we feel as if a new phase of our destiny has been revealed to
us. The playwright's wife said that this was true but irrelevant.
To her there was a sense of tragedy implied in Conrad’s work
not by factual statement but by the rhythm of his language.
“ Tchk I Tchk 1 ” said Constantine. " A great symphony
must have its themes as well as the emotional colour given by
its orchestration. And listen . . .” He said the sense of inevit-
ability in a work of art should be quite different from the scien-
tific conception of causality, for if art were creative then each
stage must be new, must have something over and above what
wais contained in the previous stages, and the connection between
the first and the last must be creative in the Bergsonian sense.
He added that it is to give this creativeness its chance to create
what was at once unpredictable and inevitable that an artist must
never interfere with his characters to make them prove a moral
point, because this is to force them down the path of the pre-

CROATIA

dictable. " Yes, that is what Tolstoy is always doing,” said the
playwright, " and all the same he convinces us he is a great
artist.” “ I feel he is not a great artist,” I said, “ I feel he
might have been the greatest of all artists, but instead chose to
be the second greatest of renegades after Judas.” “ I, too ! ”
said the poet, who had just sat down at the table. " I, too ! "

The bottles thick about us, we stayed in the restaurant till it
was five o’clock. We were then discussing Nietzsche’s attitude
to music. At eight we were back in the same restaurant, dining
with an editor leader of the Croat party which is fighting for
autonomy under a federal system, and his wife. Valetta was
there, but Constantine was not. The editor, though he him-
self was a Serb by birth, would not have sat down at the same
table with an official of the Yugoslavian Government. And
Gregorievitch was not there, not only for that reason, but because
he would not have sat down at the same table as the editor,
whom he regarded as evil incarnate.' He had come in for a glass
of brandy that evening, and on hearing where we were to spend
the evening he had become Pluto dyspeptic, Pluto sunk in
greenish gloom, caterpillar-coloured because of the sins of the
world. Yet this editor also would have died for the Slav cause,
and had indeed undergone imprisonment for its sake before the
war. He is indeed still facing grave danger, for he was running
Ills movement from the point of view of an English pre-war
Liberal, who abhorred all violence, and he not only attacked the
Yugoslavian Government for the repressive methods it used
against Croatia, but also those Croats who used violence against
the Government and who accepted Hungarian and Italian
support for terrorism. He does not mind thus risking the loss of
his only friends. He is a great gentleman, an intellectual and a
moralist, and has carved himself, working against the grain of
the wood, into a man of action.

As we talked of the political situation there ran to our table a
beautiful young Russian woman, who could be with us only
half an hour because she was supervising a play of hers about
Pushkin which had been put on at the National Theatre a few
nights before and was a failure. She brought the news that this
amazing Easter had now produced a blizzard. On her golden
hair and perfect skin and lithe body in its black dress snowflakes
were melting, her blood running the better for it ; and failure
was melting on her like a snowflake also, leaving her glowing.

6o BLACK LAMB AND GREY FALCON

" They are hard on my play ! ” she cried, choked with the ecstatic
laughter of Russian women. “ Ce n’est pas bien, ce n’est pas
mal, c’est mddiocre I ” The editor, smiling at her beauty and
her comet quality, tried to upbraid her for her play. The drama,
he said, was a great mystery, one of the most difficult forms of
art. All men of genius have tried their hand at a play at some
time, and he had read most of them. These people, I realised,
could make such universal statements. Both the editor and his
wife knew, and knew well, in addition to their native Serbo-
Croat, English, French, German, Italian, Russian, Latin and
Greek.

Nearly all these dramas, the editor continued, were bad.
The drama demanded concentration on themes which by their
very nature tempted to expansion, and only people with a special
gift for craftsmanship could handle this problem. And one
enormously increased this difficulty if, as she had done, one
chose as one's theme a great man, for what could be more
obstinately diffused than the soul of a great man ? Often,
indeed, the soul of a great man refused to be reduced to the
terms necessary even for bare comprehension ? And especially
was this true of Pushkin. Which of us can understand Pushkin ?
At that the editor and the editor’s wife and Valetta and the
Russian all began to talk at once, their faces coming close to-
gether in a bright square about the middle of the table. The
talk had been in French, it swung to Serbo-Croat, it ended in
Russian. My husband and I sat tantalised to fury. We only
knew Pushkin by translation ; we found Evgettye Onegin as
something between Don Juan and Winthrop Mackworth Praed,
and we liked his short stories rather less than Nathaniel Haw-
thorne’s : and obviously we are wrong, for because of limitations
of language we are debarred from seeing something that is
obvious to unsealed eyes as the difference between a mule and
a Derby winner.

But the Russian stood up. She had to go back to the theatre
to supervise the crowd that in the last scene of the play wept
outside Pushkin's house while he w'as dying. It was plainly the
real reason that she was leaving us, and not an excuse. There
was nothing more indicative of the high level of culture among
these people than their capacity to discuss the work of one
amongst them with complete detachment. But before she went
she made a last defence. For a short time she had found herself

CROATIA

united in experience with Pushkin, and even if that union covered
only a small part of Pushkin, it was w'orth setting down, it might
give a clue to the whole of him. Looking past her at her beauty,
in the odd way that men do, the editor said, though only to tease
her, “ Experience indeed ! Are you sure you have enough
experience ? Do you think you have lived enough to write ? ”
She answered with an air of evasion suggesting that she sus-
pected she might some day have a secret but was too innocent
to know what it was, though she was actually a married woman
at the end of her twenties, if not in her early thirties : “ I will
not argue that, because the connection between art and life is
not as simple as that ! ” But then her face crinkled into laughter
again, “ Sometimes the connection between art and life is very
close ! Think of it, there is a woman in the crowd in this last
scene whose cries always give a lead to the others and have indeed
given the end of the play much of its effect, they are always so
sad. The audience cannot hear the words the actors in the
crowd are using, they only catch the accent of the whole sentence.
And as this woman has caught the very accent of anxious grief,
I listened to what she had to say. And she was crying, ‘ Oh,
God ! Oh, God ! Let Pushkin die before the last bus leaves
for my suburb ! ’ ” She turned from us laughing, but turned
back again : “ That's something I don’t like ! There is a
mockery inherent in the art of acting, the players must make
everybody weep but themselves ; if they don’t weep they must
jeer inside themselves at the people who do weep ! ” She
shuddered, wishing she had never written the play, never had
tried her luck in the theatre, a child who had chosen the wrong
birthday treat. She brushed the sadness from her mouth and
went away, laughing. This, so far as talk was concerned, was
a representative day in Zagreb.

Shestine

“ This is a very delightful place,” said my husband the next
morning. It was Easter Sunday, and the waiter had brought in
on the breakfast-tray dyed Easter eggs as a present from the
management, and we were realising that the day before had
been wholly pleasant. " Of course, Austria did a lot for the
place,” said an Englishman, a City friend of my husband, who

6a BLACK LAMB AND GREY FALCON

vas staying in the hotel and had come to have breakfast. 1
suppose so,” said my husband, and then caught himself up.
” No, what am I saying ? It cannot be so, for this is not in the
remotest degree like Austria. Austrians do sit in caf& for hours
and they talk incessantly, but they have not this raging polyglot
intellectual curiosity, they have not this way of turning out
universal literature on the floor as if it were a rag-bag, which
indeed it is, and seeking for a fragment that is probably not
there, is probably part of an arcanum of literature that exists
only in their own heads. In cultured Vienna homes they often
give parties to hear the works of great writers read aloud : only
a few months ago I spent an evening at the house of a Viennese
banker, listening to the poems of Wildgans. But it would be
impossible to read aloud to a party of Yugoslavs, unless one
bound and gagged the guests beforehand.”

There came into the room Constantine and Gregorievitch,
who was still a little cold to us because of the company we had
kept on the previous night. “ What has Austria done for you ? "
asked my husband. ” Nothing,” said Constantine ; “ it has
not the means. What can a country without history do for a
people with a glorious history like the Serbs ? ” “I was talking
of Croatia,” said my husband. Gregorievitch said anxiously,
as if he had been detecting himself looking in the mirror, ” The
answer stands.” “ But the Austrians have their history,”
objected my husband. “ No,” said Gregorievitch, " we are its
history. We Slavs in general, we Croats in particular. The
Hapsburgs won their victories with Czechs, with Poles and,
above all, with Croats. Without us the Austrians would have
no history, and if we had not stood between them and the Turks,
Vienna would now be a Moslem city.” The Englishman
laughed, as if a tall story that knew its own height had been
told. Gregorievitch looked at him as if he had blasphemed.
” Is it a little thing that only yesterday it was decided that
Europe should not be Islamised ? " he asked. " What does he
mean ? " asked the Englishman. " That the Turks besieged
Vienna in 1683 and were turned back,” said my husband, " and
that if they had not been turned back it is possible that they would
have swept across all Europe.” “ Is that true ? ” asked the Eng-
lishman. “ Yes," said my husband. " But it’s not yesterday,”
said the Englishman. " To these people it is,” said my husband,
*• and 1 think they are right. It's uncomfortably recent, the

CROATIA

blow would have smashed the whole of our Western culture, and
we shouldn’t forget that such things happen.” ” But ask them,”
said the Englishman, “ if Austria did not do a lot for them in the
way of sanitary services.” Gregorievitch looked greenly into
the depths of the mirror as if wondering how he showed not
signs of gaiety but signs of life under the contamination of these
unfastidious English. “ Your friend, who showed no emotion
at the thought of the spires of Vienna being replaced by minarets,
doubtless would expect us to forgive the Austrians for building
oubliettes for our heroes so long as they built us chalets for our
necessities. Are you sure,” he said, speaking through his teeth,
” that you really wish to go to hear mass at the village of Shes-
tine ? It is perhaps not the kind of expedition that the English
find entertaining ? "

We drove through a landscape I have often seen in Chinese
pictures : wooded hills under snow looked like hedgehogs
drenched in icing sugar. On a hill stood a little church, full to
the doors, bright inside as a garden, glowing with scarlet and gold
and blue and the unique, rough, warm white of homespun, and
shaking with song. On the women’s heads were red handker-
chiefs printed with yellow leaves and peacocks’ feathers, and their
jackets were solidly embroidered with flowers, and under their
white skirts were thick red or white woollen stockings. Their
men were just as splendid in sheepskin leather jackets with
applique designs in dyed leathers, linen shirts with fronts em-
tvoidered in cross-stitch and fastened with buttons of Maria
Theresa dollars or lumps of turquoise matrix, and homespun
trousers gathered into elaborate boots. The splendour of these
dresses was more impressive because it was not summer. The
brocade of a rajah’s costume or the silks of an Ascot crowd are
within the confines of prudence, because the rajah is going to
have a golden umbrella held over him and the Ascot crowd are
not far from shelter, but these costumes were made for the
winter in a land of unmetalled roads, where snow lay till it
melted and mud might be knee-deep, and showed a gorgeous
lavishness, for hours and days, and even years, had been spent
in the stuffs and skins and embroideries which were thus put at
the mercy of the bad weather. There was lavishness also in
the singing that poured out of these magnificently clad bodies,
which indeed transformed the very service. Western church
music is almost commonly petitioning and infantile, a sentiment

64 BLACK LAMB AND GREY FALCON

cozening for remedy against sickness or misfortune, combined
with a masochist enjoyment in the malady, but this singing
spoke of health and fulness.

The men stood on the right of the church and the women on
the left. This is the custom also in the Orthodox Church, and
it is reasonable enough. At a ceremony which sets out to be the
most intense of all contacts with reality, men and women, who
see totally different aspects of reality, might as well stand apart.
It is inappropriate for them to be mixed as in the unit of the
family, where men and women attempt with such notorious
difficulty to share their views of reality for social purposes. From
this divided congregation comes a flood of song which asked for
absolutely nothing, which did not ape childhood, which did not
pretend that sour is sweet and pain wholesome, but which
simply adored. If there be a God who is fount of all goodness,
this is the tribute that should logically be paid to Him; if there
be only goodness, it is still a logical tribute. And again, the
worship, like their costume, was made astonishing by their
circumstances. These people, who had neither wealth nor
security, nor ever had had them, stood before the Creator, and
thought not what they might ask for but what they might give.
To be among them was like seeing an orchard laden with apples
or a field of ripe wheat, endowed with a human will and using
it in accordance with its own richness.

This was not simply due to these people’s faith. There are
people who hold precisely the same faith whose worship pro-
duces an effect of poverty. When Heine said that Amiens
Cathedral could only have been built in the past, because the
men of that day had convictions, whereas we moderns have only
opinions, and something more than opinions are needed for
building a cathedral, he put into circulation a half-truth which
has done a great deal of harm. It matters supremely what kind
of men hold these convictions. This service was impressive
because the congregation was composed of people with a unique
sort of healthy intensity. At the end we went out and stood at
the churchyard gate, and watched the men and women clumping
down a lane to the village through the deep snow, with a zest
that was the generalised form of the special passion they had
exhibited in the church. I had not been wrong about what I
had found among the Yugoslavs.

“ Are they not beautiful, the costumes of Croatia ? ” asked

CROATIA

Gregorievitch, his very spectacles beaming, his whole appearance
made unfamiliar by joy. “ Are they not lovely, the girls who
wear them, and are not the young men handsome ? And they
are very pious.” " Yes,” I said, " I have never heard a mass
sung more fervently.” “I do not mean that,” he said irrit-
ably, “ I meant pious in their Croat patriotism.” It appeared
that the inhabitants of Shestine wore these wonderful clothes
not from custom but from a positive and virile choice. They
would naturally wear ordinary Western European clothes, as
most other peasants round Zagreb do, but they are conscious
that the great patriot Anton Starchevitch is buried in the grave-
yard of their church, and they know that to him everything
Croatian was precious. We went and stood by his tomb in the
snow, while Gregorievitch, taller than ever before though not
erect, hung over its railings like a weeping willow and told us
how Starchevitch had founded the Party of the Right, which de-
fied^ both Austria and Hungary and attempted to negotiate his
country back to the position of independence it had enjoyed eight
hundred years before. ” It was Starchevitch’s motto, ‘ Croatia
only needs God and the Croats said Gregorievitch. “ For
thirty years when the glamour and wealth and triumphant
cruelty of nineteenth-century Hungary might have tempted us
young Croats to forget our country, he made us understand that
if we forgot the tradition of our race we lost our souls as if by
sin.” We were conscious of the second coat that lies about a
snow-covered world, the layer of silence ; we smelt the wood-
smoke from the village below. “ As a child I was taken to see
him,” said Gregorievitch, his voice tense as if he were a Welsh
evangelist ; “ we all drew strength from him.” Constantine,
looking very plump and cosy, announced, “ His mother was a
Serb.” " But she had been received at the time of her marriage
into the True Church,” said Gregorievitch, frowning.

We moved away, and as Constantine and I stepped into the
snowdrifts of the lane we passed three men, dark as any Hindu,
carrying drums and trumpets. “ Ohe ! Here are the gipsies,”
said Constantine, and we smiled at them, seeing pictures of
some farm kitchen crammed with people in dresses brighter than
springtime, all preparing with huge laughter to eat mountains
of lamb and pig and drink wells of wine. But the men looked
at us sullenly, and one said with hatred, “ Yes, we are gipsies.”
Both Constantine and I were so startled that we stopped in the

66 BLACK LAMB AND GREY FALCON

snow and gaped at each other, and then walked on in silence.
In the eastern parts of Yugoslavia, in Serbia and in Macedonia,
the gipsies are proud of being gipsies, and other people, which
is to say the peasants, for there are practically none other, honour
them for their qualities, for their power of making beautiful
music and dancing, which the peasant lacks, and envy them for
being exempt from the necessities of toil and order which lie
so heavily on the peasant ; and this has always been my natural
attitude to those who can please as I cannot. It was inconceiv-
able to both Constantine and myself that the gipsies should have
thought we held them in contempt or that we should have ex-
pressed contempt aloud if we had felt it.

The whole world was less delightful. The snow seemed
simply weather, the smell of the wood-smoke gave no pleasure.
“ I tell you. Central Europe is too near the Croats,” said Con-
stantine. “ They are good people, very good people, but they
are possessed by the West. In Germany and Austria they
despise the gipsies. They have several very good reasons. The
art of the gipsies commands no respect, for the capitalist system
had discredited popular art, and only exploits virtuosos. If I
go and play Liszt’s scaramoucheries very fast thump-thump-
thump and tweedle-tweedle-tweedle, they will think more of it
than the music those three men play, though it is perfectly
adapted to certain occasions. Also the gipsies are poor, and the
capitalist system despises people who do not acquire goods.
Also the West is mad about cleanliness, and the gipsies give dirt
its rights, perhaps too liberally. We Serbs are not bourgeois, so
none of these reasons make us hate the gipsies, and, believe me,
our world is more comfortable.”

I looked back at the gipsies, who were now breasting the hill,
huddled under the harsh wind that combed its crest. Life had
become infinitely poorer since we left church. The richness of
the service had been consonant with an order of society in which
peasants and gipsies were on an equal footing and there was
therefore no sense of deprivation and need ; but here was the
threat of a world where everybody was needy, since the moneyed
people had no art and the people with art had no money. Some-
thing alien and murderous had intruded here into the Slav
pattern, and its virtue had gone out of it.

CROATIA

Tvm Castles

Yes, the German influence was like a shadow on the Croat
world. We were to learn that again the next day. Gregorievitch
had arranged to take us on Easter Monday into the countty,
with Constantine and Valetta and some young Croat doctors.
It is a sign of the bitterness felt by the Croats against the Serbs
that because we were in the company of Constantine and
Gregorievitch, who were representatives of the Yugoslavian
ideas, very few Croats would meet us : and Valetta, who came
to see us because of an existing friendship with me, was slightly
embarrassed by the situation, though he concealed it. These
Croat doctors were ready to come with us, because it was our
intention to visit first a castle belonging to a great Hungarian
family who still used it as a residence for a part of the year, and
then to go on to another castle once owned by the same family, but
now used as a sanatorium for tuberculosis by a Health Insurance
Society. This gave them a professional excuse. But it snowed
all through the night of Easter Sunday, and we woke to an
Arctic morning, so we telephoned to ask Valetta and these
doctors to come all the same and have breakfast, though the
expedition would obviously have to be cancelled. They came
and proved to be delightful young men, graduates of Zagreb
University, with hopes of post-graduate work in Vienna and
Berlin and Paris, and we were having a pleasant conversation
over our coffee and boiled eggs when the door opened and
Gregorievitch came in, and we saw that we had done wrong.

It is of the highest importance that the reader should under-
stand Gregorievitch. If it were not for a small number of
Gregorievitches the eastern half of Europe (and perhaps the
other half as well) would have been Islamised, the tradition of
liberty would have died for ever under the Hapsburgs, the
Romanoffs and the Ottoman Empire, and Bolshevism would
have become anarchy and not a system which may yet be turned
to many uses. His kind has profoundly affected history and
always for the better. Reproachfully his present manifestation
said to us, " Are you not ready yet ? ’’ We stared up at him,
and my husband asked, “ But is not the weather far too bad 7 ’’
He answered, “ The sun is not shining, but the countryside will
be there all the same, will it not 7 And the snow is not too

68 BLACK LAMB AND GREY FALCON

deep." “ Are you sure ? ” my husband asked doubtfully. " I
am quite sure,” answered Grcgorievitch. “ I have rung up a
fiiend of mine, a General who has specialised in mechanical
transport, and I have told him the make of our automobiles,
and he is of the opinion that we will be able to visit both castles.”

There, as often before and after, Gregorievitch proved that
the essential quality of Slavs is not, as might be thought, imagi-
nation. He is characteristically, and in an endearing way, a
Slav, but he has no imagination at all. He cannot see that the
factual elements in an experience combine into more than them-
selves. He would not, for example, let us go to the theatre at
Zagreb. " No, I will not get you tickets,” he said with a re-
pressed indignation, like a brawl in a crypt, “ I will not let you
waste your money in that way. Since you cannot follow Serbo-
Croat easily even when it is spoken slowly, and your husband
does not understand it at all, what profit can it be for you to go
to our theatre ? ” He envisaged attendance at a play as an
attempt to obtain the information which the author has arranged
for the characters to impart to the audience by their words and
actions ; and that the actions could be used as a basis for guess-
work to the words, that the appearance of the actors, the inflec-
tions of their voices and the reactions they elicited from the
audience, could throw light not only on the play but the culture
of which it was a part, was beyond his comprehension. So now
he conceived of an expedition to the country as being under-
taken for the purpose of observing the physical and political
geography of the district, and this could obviously be pursued
in any climatic conditions save those involving actual physical
discomfort. Nevertheless the Slav quality of passion was there,
to disconcert the English or American witness, for it existed in
a degree which is found among Westerners only in highly
imaginative people. As he stood over us, grey and grooved and
Plutoish, he palpitated with the violence of his thought, ” These
people will go away without seeing the Croatian countryside,
and some day they may fail Croatia for the lack of that know-
ledge.” His love of Croatia was of volcanic ardour ; and its fire
was not affected by his knowledge that most of the other people
who loved Croatia were quite prepared, because he favoured
union with the Serbs, to kill him without mercy in any time of
crisis.

We rose, abashed, and filed out to the automobiles ; and

CROATIA

indeed at fitat the weather was not too bad. We went out of
the town in a light drizzle, passing a number of women who
were hurrying to market. They wore red kerchiefs on their
heads, red shawls and white skirts, and carried red umbrellas
in one hand, while with the other they pulled their skirts high
over their red woollen stockings, so high that some showed
their very clean white drawers of coarse linen edged with
elaborate broderie anglaise. There was a Breughel-like humour
about their movements, as if they were stylising their own
struggles with nature ; their faces showed that there was
nothing brutish about them. This was very marked among the
old women. Slavs grow old more beautifully than the people
of other races, for with the years their flesh clings closer to the
bone instead of sagging away from it. This ribbon of laughing
peasants ran beside us in an unbroken comic strip, right out
into the country, where they exercised their humour with ex-
treme good temper, for the automobiles raised fans of liquid
mud on each side of them, and everyone we met had to jump
some distance into deep snow to keep their clothes dry and clean.
But they all made a joke of it. In one village, where the plaster
houses were all painted a deep violet which was given great
depth and vibrancy by the snow and the grey sky, a lovely young
girl laughingly put her umbrella in front of her and mocked us
and herself with clownish gestures that were exquisitely graceful
and yet very funny.

Then we saw nobody on the roads. The snow began to
fall thickly and to lie. People at the door of a cottage smiled,
waved, shivered theatrically and banged the door. We passed
through a broad valley paved with the dark glass of floods. In
the driving snow a birch wood looked like a company of dancing
naked nymphs. Then there was another Chinese landscape of
wooded hills furred with snow, that went on for a long time;
they were unwinding the whole scroll for us to see. Here and
there the scroll was damaged. The painting of the woods
stopped abruptly, and we could see nothing but the silk on
which the artist worked ; the hills were hidden, and there was
nothing but the mist. Sometimes it parted and we saw a gross-
towered, butter-coloured Sckloss. They told us what Austrian
or Hungarian family had lived there, and what it was now : a
textile factory, a canning plant, a convalescent home.

It grew colder. We stopped in a little town and went into

70 BLACK LAMB AND GREY FALCON

the hotel, and warmed ouraelves with plum brandy, which is
the standard odd-time drink in Yugoslavia. The landlord spoke
to us proudly of the place, telling us they had a beautiful
memorial to some Croat patriots in the market-place, and that
not far away they had found the skeleton of a prehistoric man.
We said that we knew how that had happened. The poor man
had been taken for a nice drive in the country by Gregorievitch.
This delighted Gregorievitch ; it was pathetic to see how pleased
he was because the young Croats could lay aside their hatred of
Yugoslavia and joke with him for a little. He was very happy
indeed when, because he had pretended to be aggrieved, we
drank another round of plum brandies to his honour. Then we
started out again, into hillier country where the snow was still
deeper. At the top of a hill our automobile stuck in a snowdrift.
Peasants ran out of a cottage near by, shouting with laughter
because machinery had made a fool of itself, and dug out
the automobile with incredible rapidity. They were doubtless
anxious to get back and tell a horse about it.

Thereafter the snow was so thick on the wooded hills that
the tree-trunks were mere lines and the branches were finer than
any lines drawn by a human hand. No detail was visible in the
houses of the villages at the base of the hills. They were blocks
of soft black shadow edged with the pure white fur of the snow
on the roofs. Above the hills there was a layer of mist that drew
a dull white smudge between this pure black-and-white world
and the dark-grey sky. There was no colour anywhere except
certain notes of pale bright gold made by three things. So late
was this snowfall that the willows were well on in bud ; their
branches were too frail to carry any weight of snow, and the
buds were too small to be discernible, so each tree was a golden-
green phantom against the white earth. There were also certain
birds that were flying over the fields, bouncing in the air as if they
were thrown by invisible giants at play ; their breasts were pale
gold. And where the snow had been thickest on the banks of
the road it had fallen away in a thick crust, showing primroses.
They were the same colour as the birds’ breasts. Sometimes the
road ran over a stream, and we looked down on the willows at
its edge. From this aspect the snow their green-gold branches
supported looked like a white body prostrate in woe, an angel
that had leaped down in suicide from the ramparts of the sky.

We saw no one. Once a horse, harsh grey against a white

CROATIA

field, gave way to that erotic panic peculiar to its species, which
rolls the eye not only in fear but in enjoyment, that seeks to be
soothed with an appetite revealing that it plainly knows soothing
to be possible, and pursues what it declares it dreads. It leaped
the low hedge and fled along the road before us ; and out of a
farm on the further side of the field there ran a man, splendid
in a sapphire sheepskin jacket, who remembered to close the
door behind him as carefully as if it were not merely an extreme
of temperature he were shutting out, but an actual destroying
element of fire. When he caught the horse and dragged it off
the road, our chauffeur shouted our thanks and regrets to him ;
but he made no answer. He stood still with the horse pressing
back its head against his shoulder, in voluptuous exaggeration
of its distress, and from the contraction of his brows and his
lips it could be seen that he was barely conscious of the situation
which he was remedying, and could think of nothing but the
intense cold. To the eye the world seemed unified by the spread-
ing whiteness of the snow, yet actually each horse, even each
person, was shut off from all others in an abnormal privacy by
this pricking, burning icy air.

We passed through a village, still as midnight at midday,
and stone-blind, every door and window closed. " Think of
it," said Valetta ; " in all those cottages there are sitting nothing
but dukes and duchesses, barons and baronesses.” The peasants
here had received an emperor handsomely when by the stupidity
of his nobles he had found himself tired and wounded and humpy
and alone after a day’s hunting, and he ennobled the whole
village by patents of perfect validity. And a little further on
was our journey’s end. We got out of the automobile and found
ourselves at a lodge gateway with extravagant stables behind
it, and what were recognisably " grounds ’’ beyond it, the kind
of grounds that were made in England during the nineteenth
century after the Georgian and Regency schools of landscape
gardening, shrubby and expensive and futile ; these sloped to the
base of an extremely steep sugar-loaf hill which had something
like Balliol on the top of it. As we gaped a mist swooped on us
and all was suddenly veiled by the whirling confetti of a gentle
snowstorm. Not unnaturally, nobody was about.

“ What can have happened to them all ? ’’ asked Gregorie-
vitch. He went and pounded on the door of the porter’s lodge,
and when an astonished face appeared at the upper windows

BLACK LAMB AND GREY FALCON

he demanded, " And where is Nikolai ? Why is Nikolai not
here to meet us ? ” " He is up at the castle," said the porter ;
“ he did not think you would ^ coming.” “ Thought we were
not coming I ” exclaimed Gregorievitch, " what made him
think we were not coming ? " It had distressed him very much
to find that Valetta and the Croats and my husband and I
seemed unable to gp'asp the common-sense point of view that if
one wanted to see a castle one went and saw it, no matter
what the weather, since the castle would certainly be there, no
matter what the weather ; but he had excused it because we
were by way of being intellectuals and therefore might be ex-
pected to be a little fanciful. Here, however, were quite simple
people who were talking the same sort of nonsense. He said
testily, “ Well, we will go up and find him for ourselves.” We
climbed the sugar-loaf hill by whimsically contrived paths and
stone steps ; among fir trees that were striped black and white
like zebras, because of the branches and the layer of white snow
that lay on each of them, while the porter, who was now invisible
to us through the snow, cried up to the castle, ” Nikolai ! Nikolai !
They have come ! ” I was warm because I was wearing a
squirrel coat, but all the men were shaking with cold, and we
were all up to our knees in snow. At last we came to a walk
running round some ramparts, and Nikolai, who was a very
handsome young peasant with golden hair and blue eyes framed
by long lashes, dropped the broom with which he had been
trying to clear a path for us and ran towards Gregorievitch,
crying, “ How brave you are to make such a journey in this
weather I ” " Lord above us,” said Gregorievitch, " what does
everybody mean ? Open the door, open the door ! ”

When the door was opened the point of this fierce Arctic
journey proved to be its pointlessness. For indeed there was
nothing in the castle to match the wildness of the season, of the
distraught horses and the wavering birds, of Gregorievitch and
his people. A fortress six hundred years old had been encased
in a vast building executed in that baronial style which owed
so much more to literary than to architectural inspiration, having
been begotten by Sir Walter Scott, and though the family which
owned it had been unusually intelligent, and free-minded to the
point of being Croatian patriots, their riches had brought them
under the cultural, influence of the Austro-Hungarian Empire.
So there were acres of walls covered from floor to ceiling with

CROATIA

hunting trophies. These never, in any context, give an impres-
sion of fulness. I remembered the story of the old Hungarian
count who was heard to mutter as he lay dying, " And then the
Lord will say, ' Count, what have you done with your life ? ’ and
I shall have to say, ‘ Lord, I have shot a great many animals.'
Oh, dear ! Oh, dear ! It doesn’t seem enough.” Nobody but
the fool despises hunting, which is not only a pleasure of a
high degree, but a most valuable form of education in any
but a completely mechanised state. Marmont, who was one of
Napoleon’s most intelligent marshals, in his memoirs explains
that he was forced to hunt every day from two o’clock to night-
fall from the time he was twelve, and this put him into such
perfect training that no ordeal to which he was subjected in all
his military career ever disconcerted him. But as a sole offering
to the Lord it was not enough, and it might be doubted if this
was the right kind of hunting. These trophies spoke of nine-
teenth-century sport, which "was artificial, a matter of reared
beasts procured for the guns by peasants, and so essentially
sedentary that the characteristic sportsman of the age, com-
memorated in photographs, had a remarkable paunch.

There was also a clutterment of the most hideous furniture of
the sort that was popular in the Austro-Hungarian Empire in
the second half of the nineteenth century, walloping stuff bigger
than any calculations of use could have suggested, big in accord-
ance with a vulgar idea that bigness is splendid, and afflicted
with carving that made even the noble and austere substances
of wood ignoble as fluff. It would have been interesting to
know where they had put the old furniture that must have been
displaced by these horrors. One of the most beautiful exhibi-
tions in Vienna, the Mobiliendepot, in the Mariahilfestrasse,
was composed chiefly of the Maria Theresa and Empire furni-
ture which the Emperor Franz Josef and the Empress Elizabeth
banished to their attics when they had refurnished their palaces
from the best Arms in the Tottenham Court Road.

There were also a great many bad pictures of the same era :
enormous flushed nudes which would have set a cannibal’s
mouth watering; immense and static pictures showing what
historical events W'ould have looked like if all the personages had
been stuffed first ; and one of the family had over-indulged in the
pleasures of amateur art. She herself had been a woman of
enormous energy ; a fashionable portrait painter had repre-

74 BLACK LAMB AND GREY FALCON

seated her, full of the uproarious shire-horse vitality common to
the Women admired by Edward VII, standing in a pink-satin
ball dress and lustily smelling a large bouquet of fat roses in a
massive crystal vase, apparently about to draw the flowers
actually out of the water by her powerful inhalations. This
enormous energy had covered yards of the castle walls with
pictures of Italian peasant girls holding tambourines, lemon
branches or amphorae, which exactly represented what is meant
by the French word “ niaiserie”.

There were also some portraits of male members of the
family, physically superb, in the white-and-gold uniform of
Hungarian generals, solemnised and uplifted by the belief that
they had mastered a ritual that served the double purpose of
establishing their personal superiority and preserving civilisation
as they knew it ; it was as pathetic to see them here as it would be
to go into the garret of a starving family to see the picture of some
of its members who had been renowned on the stage as players
of kings and emperors. It might be said that though all these
things were poor in themselves, they represented a state superior
to the barbaric origins of Croatian society. But it was not so,
for the family portraits which depicted the generations of the
late sixteenth and seventeenth centuries showed people with
their heads held high by pride and their features organised by
intelligence, set on canvas by artists at least as accomplished and
coherent in vision as the painters of our Tudor portraits. They
gave documentary proof that German influence had meant
nothing but corruption.

The corruption was profound. I left my companions at one
point and turned back to a bedroom, to look again from its
windows on an enchanting view of a little lake, now a pure sheet
of snow, which lay among some groves below the sugar-loaf hill.
1 found Gregorievitch sitting on the window-sill, with his back
to the view, looking about him at the hideous pictures and
furniture with a dreamy and absorbed expression. " It would
be very pleasant to live this way," he said, without envy, but
with considerable appetite. This was the first time I had
heard him say anything indicating that he had ever conceived
living any life other than his own, which had been dedicated to
pain and danger and austerity ; and I could be sure that it was
not the money of the people who lived in the castle, not the great
fires that warmed them or the ample meals they ate, it was

CROATIA

their refinement that he envied, their access to culture. I had
never thought before what mischief a people can suffer from
domination by their enemies. This man had lived his whole life
to free Croatia from Hungarian rule ; he had been seduced into
exalting Hungarian values above Croatian values by what was
an essential part of his rebellion. He had had to tell himself
and other people over and over again that the Hungarians were
taking the best of everything and leaving the worst to the Croats,
which was indeed true so far as material matters were con-
cerned. But the human mind, if it is framing a life of action,
cannot draw fine distinctions. He had ended by believing that
the Hungarians had had the best of everything in all respects,
and that this world of musty antlers and second-rate pictures
and third-rate furniture was superior to the world where peasants
sang in church with the extreme discriminating fervour which
our poets envy, knowing themselves lost without it, and wore
costumes splendid in their obedience to those principles of
design which our painters envy, knowing themselves lost without
instinctive knowledge of them.

On the way to the sanatorium the party was now more silent.
The young men were hungry, we had all of us wet feet, the sky
threatened more snow, and the houses were now few and widely
scattered. We could understand enough to realise that it was
worrying them a little that if the automobiles broke down we
should have a long distance to walk before we found shelter.
Nobody, however, seemed to blame Gregorievitch. It was felt
that he was following his star.

It was not till after an hour and a half that we arrived at the
sanatorium, which was a fine baroque castle set on a hill, once
owned by the same family which had owned the other castle, but
now abandoned because the lands all around it had been taken
away and given to peasant tenants under the very vigorous
Agrarian Reform Scheme which the Yugoslavian Government
put into effect after the war. This visit was less of an anti-
climax than the other, for here was the real Slav quality. As
we came to the gates a horde of people rushed out to meet us,
and as my husband, who finds one of his greatest pleasures in
inattention, had never grasped that this castle had been con-
verted into a sanatorium, he believed them to be the family
retainers, and wondered that such state could be kept up nowa-
days. But they were only the patients. They rushed out, men

76 BLACK LAMB AND GRET FALCON

and women and children, all mixed together, some wearing
ordinary Western costume, and some in peasant costume ; smne
of the men wore the Moslem fez, for the Health Insurance
Society which manages the sanatorium draws its members from
all over Yugoslavia. They looked strangely unlike hospital
patients. There was not the assumption of innocence which is
noticeable in all but the wilder inmates of an English institution,
the tramps and the eccentrics ; not the pretence that they like
starched sheets as a boundary to life, that the authority of doctors
and nurses is easy to accept and reasonable in action, that a little
larking is the only departure from hospital routine they could
possibly desire, that they were as Sunday-school children mind-
ful of their teachers. These people stood there, dark, inquisitive,
critical, our equals, fully adult.

This was, of course, partly due to their racial convictions.
Many of them came from parts of Yugoslavia where there is still
no trace of a class system, where there were only peasants.
They had therefore not the same sense that in going into hospital
a worker placed himself in the hands of his superior, and that
he must please him by seeming undangerous. But also as it
appeared when we went into the doctor’s room, the theory of
illness was not the same as in a Western European hospital. We
found there the superintendent, who was a Serb though long
resident in Croatia and pro-Croat in politics, and his three Croat
assistants who all had an oddly unmedical air to English eyes.
I do not mean that they looked unbusinesslike ; on the contrary,
each of them had a sturdy air of competence and even power.
But there was in their minds no vista of shiny hospital corridors,
leading to Harley Street and the peerage, with blameless tailor-
ing and courtesy to patients and the handling of committees as
subsidiary obligations, such as appears before most English
doctors. There was no sense that medical genius must frustrate
its own essential quality, which is a fierce concentration on the
truth about physical problems, by cultivating self-restraint and
a conventional blankness which are incompatible with any
ardent pursuit. These people had an air of pure positiveness
which amounted to contentiousness. They might have been
bull-lighters.

They were bull-fighters, of course. The bull was tuberculosis.
The formalities of our reception were got over in a minute. Had
I been visiting a sanatorium in England cold and with wet feet

CROATIA

I would have had to go to the matron’s room, and time would
have been wasted. Here we shook hands, hurried to the radia-
tors, sat down on them, took off our shoes, and pressed our
stocking soles against the warm iron, while the doctors talked
their tauromachy around us. Did we know that tuberculosis
was the scourge of Southern Slavs ? It had to be so, because
the country was being rapidly industrialised. Peasants came to
the town blankly ignorant of hygiene, drawn by wages that
looked high on paper and were in fact far too low to buy proper
housing or clothing ; and there was still so little hospital treat-
ment that a tuberculosis case was as likely as not to remain
untreated and spread infection. And this was not because they
were Balkans. They said that with a sudden leap of fire to their
eyes, which could be understood by anyone who has heard
Germans or Austrians use the adjective Balkan, with a hawking
excess of gross contempt. We English, they said, had had just as
much tuberculosis at the beginning of the nineteenth century.

I have acquired, painfully enough, some knowledge of sana-
toria ; and looking round me as they talked, I could see that in a
way this sanatorium was frightful and, in another, most excellent,
The first door we opened showed us the anachronistic character
of the building in which it had been installed. We stepped
suddenly into the opaque darkness, the inconquerable midday
chill, of the family chapel, with a gilt and bosomy baroque
Virgin and half a dozen cherubs ballooning above the altar,
and two of the family gaunt in marble on their tombs. A con-
gregation of nuns, each a neat little core to a great sprawling
fruit of black-and-white robes, swivelled round on their knees
to see who the intruders might be, and the Mother Superior,
with a gesture of hospitality completely in consonance with the
air of the presiding Virgin behind the altar, ceased the chanting
of the service until we had ended our visit. Such a gesture had
probably not been made in Western Europe for three hundred
years. I do not believe it is easy to convert to hospital use a
seventeenth-century castle built on three storeys round an
immense courtyard, with immensely high rooms and floors of
stone and marble, and to staff it with people so much in accord
with that same century that to them everything on the margin
of hygiene, the whole context of life in which the phrase of
science appears, must have been wholly incomprehensible.

But the place was clean, fantastically clean, clean like a

78 BLACK LAMB AND GREY FALCON

battleship. There at least was something that an English,
hospital authority would have had to approve ; perhaps, how-
ever, the only thing they could. The patients within doors were
shocking to Western theories as they had been when they had
met us out of doors on our arrival. They were evidently pre-
occupied with the imaginative realisation of their sickness, and
no one was attempting to interfere with them in their pleasure.
This was a visiting day ; and in what had been the grand
drawing-room of the ladies of the castle, a large apartment
adorned with sugary Italianate late nineteenth-century murals
representing the islands of the blest, women sat holding their
handkerchiefs to their lips with the plangent pathos of La Dame
aux Camillas, and men assumed the sunrise mixed with sunset
glamour of the young Keats, while their families made no
attempt to distract them from these theatrical impersonations
but watched with sympathy, as audiences should. The patients
who had no visitors were resting ; and when we went into the
wards they were lying on their beds, the quilts drawn over their
mouths, the open windows showing a firmament unsteadily yet
regularly cleft by the changing stripes of snowfall. Shivering,
they stared at us, their eyes enormous over the edges of their
quilts, enjoying at its most dramatic the sense of the difference
between our health and their disease ; and indeed in the dark
beam of their hypnotic and hypnotised gaze the strangeness of
their plight became newly apparent, the paradox of the necessity
which obliged them to accept as a saviour the cold which their
bodies believed to be an enemy, and to reject as death the
warmth which was the known temperature of life. The doctors
beside us appeared to take for granted this atmosphere of poetic
intensity, and made none of the bouncing gestures, none of the
hollow invocations to optimism which in England are perpetually
inflicted on any of the sick who show consciousness of their state.
The tolerance of these doctors, indeed, was wide. As we passed
along a corridor overlooking the courtyard, there trembled, in
one of the deep recesses each window made in the thickness of
the wall, a shadow that was almost certainly two shadows, fused
by a strong preference. " Yes,” said the superintendent, “ they
sometimes fall in love, and it is a very good thing. It sometimes
makes all the difference, they get a new appetite for living, and
then they do so well.” That was the answer to all our Western
scruples. The patients were doing so well. Allowed to cast

CROATIA

themselves for great tragic roles, they were experiencing the
exhilaration felt by great tragic actors. It was not lack of con-
trol, lack of taste, lack of knowledge that accounted for per-
mission of what was not permitted in the West. Rather was
it the reverse. Our people could not have handled patients full
of the dangerous thoughts of death and love ; these people had
such resources that they did not need to empty their patients of
such freight.

The doctors themselves were living richly. They were enjoy-
ing the sense of power which comes to the scientist when he
applies his knowledge to a primitive people. They talked of the
peasants as of beautiful and vigorous animals that have to be
coaxed and trapped and bludgeoned into submitting to the
treatment which will keep alive the dame in their bodies without
which they will have neither beauty nor vigour. So, of course,
do any colonial administrators ; but these doctors cared for
loveliness with the uncorrupted eye of an unmechanised race,
and though they were divided from the patients by the gulf that
divides a university graduate from a peasant, that gulf was
bridged by the consciousness that they all were Slavs and that
their forebears had all been peasants together. Each of these
doctors was a magician who was working his spells to save his
father and his mother. It is this same, situation, I imagine,
which is responsible for the peculiar enthusiasm shown by
officials engaged in the social services in Soviet Russia. This is
often regarded as a specific effect of a Communist regime, but
it could certainly be matched all over the Balkans, in all the
Baltic provinces that were formerly under the Tsardom, and in
Turkey. The old and the new sometimes make an intoxicating
fusion. These doctors were enchanted with their X-ray depart-
ment and their operating theatre where they had a pretty record
of successful collapses of the lung, and they were enchanted,
too, when they hurried us down the corridors, down a staircase
of stone so old that it was black as iron, and through a door of
wood so old that it shone as glass, to a vast kitchen, obscure in
its great vaulted roof, glowing near the fires which were roaring
like the night wind in a forest. At long tables half as thick as
tree-trunks, pretty nuns in white robes put the last touches to
that state of order which women make twice a day after meals
and live only to unmake. The prettiest one of all we found in a
store-room half the size of my flat in London, standing by a

8e BLACK LAMB AND GREY FALCON

table covered with the little sweet biscuits made of nuts and
meringue and fine pastry which are loved in every Slav country.
We caught her eating one. She swallowed it in a gulp, and faced
out the men's roar of laughter in the most serene confusion
imaginable, smiling, with some tiny crumbs caught in the fair
down on her upper lip. It was then that somebody remembered
that our dinner was ready for us.

We were taken up to the doctors’ mess and set before a
further exhibition of antique plenty. There was a river of plum
brandy somewhere near, it seemed. Then, to begin with, there
was a platter of cold meat such as I never expected to eat in my
life again. There was sucking-pig so delicate that it could be
spread on bread like butter, and veal and ham and sausage and
tongue, all as superb in their austerer way, and slabs of butter
and fat cheese. Then there were pancakes, stuffed with chopped
steak and mushrooms and chicken’s livers, and then spring
chicken served with a border of moist and flavoursome rice on
a bed of young vegetables, and it appeared that there was also
a river of white wine near by. And then there was a compote
of quinces, cherries and peaches, served with a slack of little
biscuits, like the one wc had found the pretty nun eating. We
ate and drank enormously. Valetta said in my car, " You really
must cat, you know. They will think you dislike their food if
you do not. It is our Slav custom to give our guests too much
to eat, as a kind of boastfulness, and of course out of goodwill,
and the guests show how strong they are by eating it. We are
really a very primitive people, I am afraid.” I did not complain,
and we ate without interruption, save when a nun put her head
round the door, and w'ith round eyes cried out an announcement.
The superintendent spoke to one of the younger doctors who
took off his coat, rolled up his sleeves, and ran from the room
at the double. " Two of the patients have been talking politics,”
explained the superintendent ; “ it is not allowed, but some-
times they do it. However it is not really serious, they have no
weapons. But go on eating, go on eating. All our food is raised
on the land belonging to the sanatorium or round it, and pre-
pared by our good nuns. And mind you, the patients have the
same food as you are having. This is a feast for distinguished
visitors, of course, but at all times wc give them plenty, for it is
cheap and we have no need to skimp it.” ” Yes,” said another
of the doctors, waving his glass at me, “ we send the patients

CROATIA

home five and ten and fifteen kilos heavier.*'

Here was the authentic voice of the Slav. These people hold
that the way to make life better is to add good things to it,
whereas in the West we hold that the way to make life better is
to take bad things away from it. With us, a satisfactory hospital
patient is one who, for the time being at least, has been castrated
of all adult attributes. With us, an acceptable doctor is one
with all asperities characteristic of gifted men rubbed down by
conformity with social standards to a shining, comerless bland-
ness. With us, a suitable hospital diet is food from which
everything toxic and irritant has been removed, the eunuchised
pulp of steamed fish and stewed prunes. Here a patient could
be adult, primitive, dusky, defensive ; if he chose to foster a
poetic fantasy or personal passion to tide him over his crisis, so
much the better. It was the tuberculosis germ that the doctor
wanted to alter, not the patient ; and that doctor himself might
be just like another man, provided he possessed also a fierce
intention to cure. To him the best hospital diet would be
that which brought the most juices to the mouth ; and there
was not the obvious flaw in the argument that one might think,
for the chicken and the compote were the standard dishes of any
nursing-home, but these were good to eat. One of the doctors
raised his glass to me ; I raised my glass to him, enjoying the
communion with this rich world that added instead of subtract-
ing. I thought of the service at Shestine, and its unfamiliar
climate. The worshippers in Western countries come before the
altar with the desire to subtract from the godhead and them-
selves ; to subtract benefits from the godhead by prayer, to
subtract their dangerous adult qualities by affecting childishness.
The worshippers at Shestine had come before the altar with a
habit of addition, which made them pour out the gift of their
adoration on the godhead, which made them add to themselves
by imaginative realisation the divine qualities which they were
contemplating in order to adore. The effect had been of enor-
mous, reassuring natural wealth ; and that was what I had found
in Yugoslavia on my first visit. I had come on stores of wealth
as impressive as the rubies of Golconda or the gold of Klondyke,
which took every form except actual material wealth. Now the
superintendent was proposing the health of my husband and
myself, and when he said, '* We are doing our best here, but we
are a poor country,” it seemed to me he was being as funny as

8a BLACK LAMB AND GREY FALCON

rich people who talk to their poor relations about the large
amount they have to pay in income tax.

“ But since they have this Slav abundance here and at
Shestine,” I wondered, “ why have I had so little enjoyment of
it since I arrived ? ”

But my attention was caught by a crack that had suddenly
begun to fissure the occasion. The superintendent had been
telling my husband and me what pleasure he had in welcoming
U8 to Croatia, when Gregoricvitch had leaned across the table
and corrected him. “ To Yugoslavia,” he said in the accents of
a tutor anxious to recall his pupil to truth and accuracy. There
fellasilence. " To Yugoslavia," he repeated. Severity still lived
in his brows, which he brought together by habit. But his eyes
were stricken ; so does an old dog look when it hopes against
hope that the young master will take him out on a walk. After
another silence, the superintendent said, “ Yes, I will say that
1 welcome them to Yugoslavia. Who am 1, being a Serb, to
refuse this favour to a Croat ? ” They all laughed kindly at
Gregorievitch after that ; but there had sounded for an instant
the authentic wail of poverty, in its dire extreme, that is caused by
a certain kind of politics. Such politics we know very well in
Ireland. They grow on a basis of past injustice. A proud
people acquire a habit of resistance to foreign oppression, and
by the time they have driven out their oppressors they have
forgotten that agreement is a pleasure and that a society which
has attained tranquillity will be able to pursue many delightful
ends. There they continue to wrangle, finding abundant material
in the odds and ends of injustices that are left over from the
period of tyranny and need to be tidied up in one way or another.
Such politics are a leak in the community. Generous passion,
pure art, abstract thought, run through it and are lost. There
remain only the obstinate solids which cannot be dissolved by
argument or love, the rubble of hate and prejudice and malice,
which are of no price. The process is never absolute, since in
all lands some people arc born with the inherent sweetness which
closes that leak, but it can exist to a degree that alarms by the
threat of privation affecting ail the most essential goods of life •
and in Croatia I had from time to time felt very poor.

CROATIA

Zagreb TV

There is no end to political disputation in Croatia. None.

Because we were walking near the vegetable market we trod
on a mosaic of red and green cabbage leaves, orange peel and
grey stone. I directed the attention of Valetta and Constantine
to its beauty, and I even became ecstatic over it ; but I could
not distract them from their heavy sense of disagreement. I had
to admit that the experience I was offering them was perhaps
insufficiently interesting, so when I found myself in front of a
cage where a grey-and-pink parrot sat before a card index of
destinies, I was glad to cry, “ Let us have our fortunes told ! ”
But Constantine and Valetta each looked at the bird with eyes
smouldering with hope that the other would have no future
whatsoever. So I put in my dinar and the bird picked out a
card ; and when I gave it to Valetta, he burst out laughing and
threw it back to me. Oh, wise bird I It says, ‘ You are sur-
rounded by the wrong friends, you must get rid of them at
once ! "’ He waved his cap and went laughing through the
crowd. " Till you have obeyed, it is good-bye ! ” he cried over
his shoulder ; and then suddenly grave, lest we should think he
had really turned against us, he said, “ And I shall come to see
you to-night, about seven."

They had quarrelled all through lunch. We had spent the
morning going round the sights of the town with a Croat lady
and Constantine, and over the soup we told Valetta how much
we had liked her ; and Constantine exploded : " I did not like
her. She is not a true Slav. Did you hear what she told you
when you were at the Health Cooperative Society Clinic ? She
said that all such things were vety well looked after in the
Austrian times. Yes, and she said it regretfully.” " Well, it
was so,” said Valetta. “ Yes, it was so,” said Constantine, ” but
we must not regret it. No true Slav would regret it. That is to
say no true human being would say it, for if a true human being
is a Slav, he knows that to be a Slav is what is important,
for that is the shape which God has given him, and he should
keep it. The Austrians sometimes pampered you, and some-
times the Hungarians, so that each should play you off against
the others. Benefits you get so are filth, and they spoil your
shape as a Slav. It is better to have nearly nothing at all, and

84 BLACK LAMB AND GREY FALCON

be a freeman with your brother Slavs." He paused, but Valetta
was silent and went on eating. “ Do you not think it is better 7 ”
Constantine asked him. He nodded slightly. “ Well, if you do
not feel that strongly you can feel nothing at all ! ” said Con-
stantine a little louder. " Oh, yes, I feel it strongly,” said
Valetta, quite softly : and then, more softly still, “ It would be
much better for us to be freemen with our brother Slavs.”

For a moment Constantine was satisfied and went on eating.
Then he threw down his knife and fork. ” What is that you are
saying 7 It would be better . . . you mean it is not so 7 ”
" 1 mean it is not quite so,” said Valetta. " How is it not so 7 "
asked Constantine, lowering his head like a bull. Valetta
shrugged his shoulders. Constantine collapsed quite suddenly,
and asked pathetically, “ But are we not brothers, we Croats
and Serbs 7 ” “ Yes," said Valetta. He was speaking softly,
not, as a stranger might have thought, out of guile, but out of
intense feeling. He was quite white. “ But in Yugoslavia,”
he said painfully, ” it is not so. Or, rather, it is as if the Serbs
were the elder brother and we Croats the younger brother, under
some law as the English, which gives the elder everything and
the younger nothing.” " Oh, I know what you think 1 ” groaned
Constantine. “ You think that all your money goes to Belgrade,
and you get hardly anything of it back, and we flood your
country with Serb officials, and keep Croats out of all positions
of real power. I know it all ! ”

“ You may know it all,” said Valetta, " but so do we : and
it is not a thing we can be expected to overlook.” ” I do not
ask you to overlook it,” said Constantine, beginning to roar like
a bull, " 1 ask you to look at it. You did not have the spending
of your money before, when you were under Hungary. All your
money was sent to Budapest to landlords or to tax-collectors,
and you got some railways, yes, and some hospitals, yes, and
some roads, yes, but not costing one-half of your money, and
you got also Germanisation and Magyarisation, you got the
violation of your soul. But now you are a part of Yugoslavia,
you are a part of the kingdom of the South Slavs, which exists
to let you keep your soul, and to guard that kingdom we must
have an army and a navy to keep Hungary and Italy in their
places, and we must give Serbia many things she did not have
because Serbia was fighting the Turk when you were standing
safe behind us, and we must do much for Bosnia, because the

CROATIA

Hungarians did nothing there, and we must do everything for
Macedonia, because the Turks were there till 1912, and we must
drain marshes and build schools and make military roads, and
it is all for you as well as for us, but you will not see it 1 ”

“ Yes, I see it," said Valetta, " but if you want to found a
strong and civilised Yugoslavia you should have brought the
Serb schools up to the Croat level instead of bringing the Croat
schools down to Serb level.” “ But now you show you see
nothing at all,” wailed Constantine ; ” it is a question of money I
It is more important that one should have good schools every-
where than that one part of the country should have very good
schools. A chain is as strong as its weakest link. What good
is it to you in Croatia that your boys and girls can read the
Hindustani and paint like Raphael if the young men in Mace-
donia go bang-bang all night at whoever because they do not
know anything else to do ? ” “ We might feel more confidence
that our money went to build schools in Macedonia if it did
not go through Belgrade,” said Valetta. “ You must forgive us
for fearing that a great deal of it sticks in Belgrade.” " O.
course it sticks in Belgrade ! ” said Constantine, his voice going
high, though it is low by nature. ” We must make a capital.
We must make a capital for your sake, because you are a ^uth
Slav ! All Western Europeans despise us because we have a
little capital that is not chic. They are wrong, for there is no
reason why we should have a big capital, for we are a peasant
state. But you must give these people what they want, and
they are like children, it is the big shining thing that impresses
them. Do you not remember how before the war the Austrian
Ministers treated us like dirt, because Vienna is a place of
baroque palaces and we had nothing but our poor town that
had a Turkish garrison till fifty years ago, though it meant
nothing, for at the appointed time we came down on them
like a hammer on nutshells ? ”

" If it were only ministries and hotels that were being built
in Belgrade, we Croats might approve,” said Valetta, “ but we
understand that there are many private houses which are being
built for people who have been connected with politics.” " It
is not true, I swear it is not true,” cried Constantine. “ Are you
telling me,” asked Valetta, ” that all Serb officials are honest ? ”
Constantine rocked in his seat. “ I am all for chonesty,” he
said, giving the h its guttural sound, ” I am a very chonest

VOL. I G

86 BLACK LAMB AND GREY FALCON

man." And that is true : during- his life he has had the un-
questioned administration of much money, and never has one
penny stuck to his fingers. “ And I admit,” he continued
heavily, " that in our ^rbia there are sometimes people -who
are not chonest. But how could we do ? There are not enough
people in our country to take on the administration, so many of
us were killed in the war. Ninety per cent,” he wailed, “ ninety
per cent of our university students were killed in the war.’’ And
that, too, I learned afterwards, is true. ” Then why do you not
draw on us Croats for officials ? ” asked Valetta. " There are
many Croats whom nobody in the world would dare to call un-
trustworthy.” “ But how can we let you Croats be officials ? ”
spluttered Constantine. “ You are not loyal ! ” “ And how,”
asked Valetta, white to the lips, “ can we be expected to be loyal
if you always treat us like this ? ” " But I am telling you,”

grieved Constantine, “ how can we treat you differently till you
are loyal ? ”

It is an absolute deadlock ; and the statement of it filled the
heart with desolation. Constantine pushed away his plate and
said, ” Valetta, I will tell you what is the matter with you.”
“ But we can see nothing the matter with either of you,” I inter-
vened. " After we left you at the Health Cooperative Clinic the
Croat lady took us to the Ethnographical Museum. What
genius you Slav peoples have I I have never seen such a wealth
of design, provoked by all sorts of objects al-vcays to perfection.
A dress, an Easter egg, a butter-churn.” I knew that my inter-
vention was feeble, but it was the best I could do. I find that
this always happens -when I try to interrupt Slavs who are
quarrelling. They draw all the energy out of the air by the
passion of their debate, so that anything outside its orbit can
only flutter trivially. " I -will tell you what is the matter with
you,” repeated Constantine, silencing me with his hand. “ Here
in Croatia you are lawyers as well as soldiers. You have been
good lawyers, and you have been lawyers all the time. For
eight hundred years you have had your proces against Hungary.
You have quibbled over phrases in the diploma inaugurate of
your kings, you have WTangled about the power of your Ban,
you have sawed arguments about regna soda axiA partes adnexae,
you have chattered like Jackdaws over your rights under the
Dual Monarchy, you have covered acres of paper discussing the
Hungaro-Croatian compromise. And so it is that you are now

CROATIA

more la'wyers than soldiers, for it is not since the eighteenth cen-
tury that you have fought the Tirrks, and you fought against the
Magyars only a little time. But now we are making Yugoslavia
we must feel not like lawyers but like soldiers, we must feel in
a large way about the simple matter of saving our lives. You
must cast away all your little rights and say that we have a big
right, the right of the Slavs to be together, and we must sacrifice
all our rights to protect that great right."

Valetta shrugged his shoulders once more. “ What have you
against that ? " roared Constantine. " I will tell you what is
the matter with you. You are an intellectual, you are all intel-
lectuals here in the bad sense. You boast because Zagreb is an
old town, but that it is a great pity for you. Everywhere else in
Serbia is a new town, and though we have novelists and poets
and all, they have not been in no town not more than not one
generation." (This is good Serbian grammar, which piles up its
negatives.) " So what the peasant knows they also know.
They know that one must not work against, one must work with.
One ploughs the earth that would not be ploughed, certainly,
but one falls in with the earth’s ideas so much as to sow it with
seed in the spring and not in the winter or in the summer. But
in the town you do not know that, you can go through life and
you can work against all, except the motor car and the railway
train and the tram, them you must not charge with your head
down, but all other things you can. So you are intellectuals.
The false sort that are always in opposition. My God, my God,
how easy it is to be an intellectual in opposition to the man of
action ! He can always be so much cleverer, he can always pick
out the little faults. But to make, that is more difficult. So it
is easier to be a critic than to be a poet.” He flung down a fork
suddenly. “ But I should say it is easier to be a bad critic. To
be a great critic you must make sometimes and know how it is
in your own self to make well or badly. That is why I am a
great critic. I am also a great poet. But you are not poets, you
Croats, you do not make. You are always little and clever, you
are always in opposition winning points as if it were a game."
He flung himself on his jam pancakes like a hungry lion, then,
with his mouth full, roared again, “ All of you in Zagreb are
the same. I have been in the caf6s every night and the Croats
all say to me, * It is disgusting, the trade pact you in Belgrade
have made with Italy 1 ' And who are the Croats, who took

88 BLACK LAMB AND GREY FALCON

Italian help to kill our King, who are howling always that your
peasants are so poor, to attack us if we swallow our pride and
for the sake of getting the peasants a little money make a trade
pact with the Italians ? Ach, in all your little ways you are
very terrible.”

For a time Valetta did not answer. It is a considerable part
of the Croat argument that Croats do not shout in restaurants
and do not speak at all with their mouths full. “ You would say
we were well-governed here ? ” he asked presently. “ You
would say that nobody is arrested without cause and thrown
into prison and treated barbarously ? You would say that
nobody has been tortured in Croatia since it became Yugo-
slavia ? " He was trembling, and such sick horror passed across
his face that I am sure he was recollecting atrocities which he
had seen with his own eyes, at which his own bowels had revolted.
Constantine nearly cried. " Ah, God 1 it is their fault." he pled,
indicating my husband and myself with his thumb. “ These
English are hypocrites, they pretend you govern people without
using force, because there are many parts of the Empire where
they govern only people who want to be governed. It is not
necessary to use force in Canada and Australia, so they pretend
that there is the general rule, though in India where the people
do not want to be governed many people are beaten and im-
prisoned. And for that I do not blame the English. It must
be done if one race has to have power over another ; that is why
it is wrong for one race to have power over another, and that is
why we must have a Yugoslavia, a self-governing kingdom of
the South Slavs, and why we should make all possible sacrifices
for Yugoslavia.” “ I see the argument,” said Valetta ; “ we
are to let Serbs torture us Croats, because under Yugoslavia we
are not to be tortured by the Italians and Hungarians.” " Oh,
God ! Oh, God ! ” cried Constantine, " I am glad that I am
not a Croat, but a Serb, for though I myself am a very clever
man, the Serbs are not a very clever people ; that has not been
their business, their business has been to drive out the Turks and
keep their independence from the Austrians and the Germans,
so their strong point is that they can open doors by butting

them with their heads. Believe me, in such a position as ours

that is more important. But my God, my God, do you know
what I feel like doing when I talk to you Croats ? I feel like
rolling up my coat and lying down in the middle of the street,

CROATIA

and putting my head on my coat, and saying to the horses and
motor cars, ‘ Drive on, I am disgusted.’ What is so horrible in
this conversation is that you are never wrong, but I am always
right, and we could go on talking like this for ever, till the clever
way you are never wrong brought death upon us." " Some
have died already," said Valetta.

Zagreb V

The rest of the afternoon was to prove to us that Constantine
was to some extent right, and that the Croat is weakened by
Austrian influence as by a profound malady.

When Valetta had left us in front of the parrot’s cage,
Constantine said, “ Now we must hurry, for we have two things
to do this afternoon. We must see the treasury of the Cathedral
and then we must go to the dancer who has promised to dance
for us in her apartment." He walked beside us very glumly,
looking at the pavement, and then burst out : “ I do not know
why you trouble yourself with that young man, he is not of
importance, he is quite simply a Croat, a typical Croat." After
a silence we came to the square in front of the Cathedral. He
burst out again : " They do appalling things and they make us
do appalling things, these Croats. When God works through
the Croats He works terribly. I will tell you what once happened
in the war. There was a hill in Serbia that we were fighting for
all night with the Austrian troops. Sometimes we had it, and
sometimes they had it, and at the end we wholly had it, and
when they charged us we cried to them to surrender, and through
the night they answered, ‘ The soldiers of the Empire do not
surrender,’ and it was in our own tongue they spoke So we
knew they were our brothers the Croats, and because they were
our brothers we knew that they meant it, and so they came
against us, and we had to kill them, and in the morning they all
lay dead, and they were all our brothers."

Just then, the face of the Cathedral rose pearly-brown above
us. Constantine tiptoed to the sacristan and said that we wanted
to see the treasury, and there began a scurrying quest for the
key. A sacristan in ordinary breeches and shirt-sleeves was
carrying away the tubs of oleanders that had decorated the altar
during Easter. His face was pursed with physical effort and an

90 BLACK LAMB AND GREY FALCON

objection to it, and the oleander branches waved about him like
the arms of a vegetable Sabine. “ They are a long time seeking
the key,” said Constantine wearily, leaning against a pillar and
looking up to its high flowering. “ I would not have you think
that the Croats are not good people. All Slavs are good people.
They were the best soldiers in the Austro-Hungarian Empire.
All, all said so, on all the fronts. Hey, what is this ? ” A priest
had come to say that the key had had to be sent for, that it
would come soon. He then ran towards a little door through
which five or six other people ran constantly during the next
quarter of an hour, on errands connected with the finding of the
key. ” Now I as a Serb do not think it is as important that
the key should be found quickly as you English would do," said
Constantine, " but I would point out to you that in Zagreb also
the key is not found in the quick English tempo. Yet I am sure
that here they say to you all day, ‘ We are not as the Serbs in
Belgrade, here we are business-like, we do things as they are
done in Vienna.’ ” And it was true. So they had said to us
constantly in the banks and hotels and museums.

At last a priest came with the key in his hand, and took us
up a stone staircase to the treasury which had an enormous
safe-door, affixed after the theft of a tenth-century ivory diptych,
which was discovered some years later in the museum at Cleve-
land, Ohio. The safe-door took quite a long time to open, it
was so very elaborate. Then the priest went in and immediately
ran out with a chalice of which he was evidently very proud,
though it was not very di.stinguishcd late sixteenth-century work.
For some reason all Croat priests both in Croatia and Dalmatia
have a special liking for dull Renaissance work. Byzantine
work they value for its antiquity only, and its lavish use of
precious metals, and medieval work they usually despise for its
uncouthness. The priest was quite ecstatic about this chalice,
which he put down on a little rickety table on the landing out-
side the treasury, and made us stand and admire it for some
time. Then he said that we must see the jew’elled mitre of a
sixteenth-century bishop, and he showed us into the treasury.
After we had looked at the silver we were shown the diptych,
which is pleasing but not satisfying, because it lacks spacious-
ness. The figures are the right hieroglyphics ; they could spell
out a magic message, but they do not, because they are so
crowded ; it is like a poem printed with the words run together.

CROATIA

We were shown also the sham diptych, which was substituted
by the thief for the real one so that the theft went undetected for
some days. This was a surprising story, for though the copy
reproduced all the details of the original, it was with such
infidelity, such falsity of proportion and value, that the two were
quite unlike in effect. It is possible that the copy was carved in
some centre of craftsmanship, perhaps in Italy, by somebody
who had never seen the original but worked from a photograph.

While we were discussing this the priest uttered a sharp cry
and ran out of the room, while Constantine burst into laughter.
He explained, " He has remembered that he has left the chalice
on the table outside.” I said, “ But why do you laugh ? It is
a thing that any of us might have done.” “ But it is not,” said
Constantine. " Your husband would not have done it at all,
because he is English. You might or might not have done it,
because you are a woman, and so of course you have no very
definite personality. But I would have been sure to do it, and
the priest was sure to do it. But because I am a Serb I know I
am sure to do it, while because he is a Croat he thinks he is like a
German or an Englishman and will not do it. Of course I must
laugh. It is the same funny thing as about the key.”

When the priest came back he showed us the illuminated
psalters and bibles ; and in one of them we fell on the record of
what is always pleasing, a liberal and humanist soul which
found perfect satisfaction and a refuge from troubled times in
the church. On the margins of his holy book he painted towns
set on bays where it would be good to swim, meadows where
spring had smiled four hundred years and was not tired, and
rosy nudes with their flesh made sound by much passive exercise.
We would have thought that the man who painted so was at ease
with the world had we not turned a page and found proof that
he was nothing of the kind. With unbroken sweetness but in
perplexed misery, he painted a hunter lying asleep in the woods
and peopled the glades with his dream. The hunter is spitted
before a lively fire by hinds who sniff in the good roasting smell,
while hares chase hounds lather-mouthed with fright and cram
their limp bodies into baskets, and by every stroke of the brush
it is asked, “ What are blue seas and the spring and lovely
bodies so long as there are pain and cruelty ? ” He spoke to us
for one second out of the past and instantly returned there, for
the priest preferred that we looked at his vestments rather than

BLACK LAMB AND GREY FALCON

at this books. " And indeed they are very beautiful,” said Con-
stantine. They were of embroidered damask and stamped
velvet, for the most part of Italian provenance, some as old as
the sixteenth century. “ But how poor they look ! ’’ 1 said.
“ You are hard to please,” he said. " No, I am not,” I said,
“ but compared to the design we saw in the Ethnographical
Museum these seem so limited and commonplace.”

I was not flattering Constantine. The designs on the vest-
ments were of that Renaissance kind which, if one sees them in
a museum and tries to draw them, distress one by their arbitrari-
ness. They partake neither of naturalism nor of geometrical
pattern ; they often depict flowers set side by side to make
harmonies of colour and united by lines whose unpleasant lack
of composition is disguised by those harmonies. The designs
in the Slav embroideries are based on sound line, on line that
is potent and begets as it moves, so that in copying it the pencil
knows no oppposition ; it is, as Constantine would say, “ work-
ing with ”. Also the Slav designs have great individuality while
keeping loyal to a defined tradition, whereas the Italian designs
follow a certain number of defined models. " You are right,”
said Constantine benignly. “ We are a wonderful people.
That is why wc want to be Slavs and nothing else. All else is
too poor for us. But now we must go to the dancer ; she is
having the accompanist specially for us, so wc must not be late."

The dancer lived on the top floor of a modern apartment
house. The blond floor of her practice room shone like a pool
under the strong light from the great windows, and though her
accompanist had not yet come, she was swaying and circling
over it like a bird flying low over the water, as swallows do
before rain. She turned at the end of the room and danced back
to greet us. She had that vigorous young beauty that seems
to carry its keen cold about with it. Her eyes were bright and
her cheeks glowed as if she were not really here, as if she were
running on her points up the cornices of a snow peak to a fairy
ice-palace. She had the most relevant of beauties for her trade,
the bird foot that bom dancers have, that Nijinsky had to per-
fection. Before she got to us she stopped and pointed to a
gilded laurel wreath that hung on the wall. As she pointed
with her right hand her left heel moved a thought backwards,
and the result was perfection. I went up and looked at the
wreath and found that she had been awarded it at some Berlin

CROATIA

dance festival. “ That is why we have come," said Constantine,
“ she won the second prize at the great Folk-Dance festival. It
is a great honour.”

My husband said, " Please tell her we think her dress most
beautiful. Is it a Croatian peasant dress ? ’’ “ Ach, no I " said
Constantine. “ But no, my God, I am wrong, it is." He went
down on his knees and looked at the skirt. It was of white linen
embroidered with red and white flowers of a very pure design.
" Yes,” he said, " it is a Croatian peasant dress, but she has
adapted it to Western ideas. She has made it much lighter.
Well, we shall see. Here comes the accompanist.” We watched
the girl’s feet move like nothing substantial, like the marks on
eddying water. Her skirts flowed round her in rhythms counter
to the rhythms of her feet, and smiling she held out her hands
to invisible partners to share in this dear honourable drunken-
ness. Out of the air she conjured them till they were nearly
visible, frank and hearty fellows that could match her joke with
joke, till shyness came and made all more delicate, and for a
second all laughter vanished and she inscribed on the air her
potentiality for romance. Her head and bosom hung back-
wards from the stem of her waist like a flower blown backwards,
but for fear that this wind blow too strongly, she called back
the defence of laughter, and romped again.

When she stopped we all applauded ; but as soon as she
went away to change her dress Constantine said to me, " It is
terrible, is it not ? ” " Yes, it is very shocking,” I said, " but I
thought it must be so from her dress.” My husband said, “ I do
not know what you mean. It seems to me we have been watch-
ing a very accomplished dance of little or no imaginative dis-
tinction, but I cannot understand why anybody should consider
it as shocking.” " No, of course you cannot understand, but
your wife can, because she has been in Serbia and Macedonia,
and she knows how it is natural for a Slav woman to dance.
She knows that with us a woman must not dance like this. It
does not go with any of our ideas. A woman must not spring
about like a man to show how strong she is and she must not
laugh like a man to show how happy she is. She has something
else to do. She must go round ■wearing heavy clothes, not light
at all, but heavy, hea-vy clothes, so that she is stiff like an ikon,
and her face must mean one thing like the face of an ikon, and
when she dances she must move without seeming to move, as if

BLACK LAMB AND GREY FALCON

she were an ikon held up before the people. It is something
you cannot understand, Wt for us it is right. Many things in
our culture accord with it.*’ " Is this something that is taken
for granted and spoken about, or have you just thought of it ? ”
asked my husband. " I have just thought of putting it like this, ”
said Constantine, laughing, “ but that is nothing against it, for
I am a demoniac man like Goethe, and my thoughts represent
the self-consciousness of nature. But indeed your wife wUl tell
you it is so.” " Yes,” I said, “ he is right. They shuffle round
as if they were dead, but somehow it looks right."

When the dancer came back she was committing a worse
offence against Slav convention. It happens that Lika, which
is a district of Dalmatia, in the Karst, that is to say on the bare
limestone mountains, breeds a kind of debonair Highlander,
rather hard to believe in, so like is he to the kind of figure that a
Byron-struck young lady of the early nineteenth century drew in
her album. The girl’s dress was a principal-boy version of this,
a tight bodice and kilt of oatmeal linen, with a multicoloured
sporran, and she wore the typical male Lika head-dress, a cap
with an orange crown, a black rim, and a black lock of fringe
falling over the ear and nape of the neck on the right side. It
suited her miraculously, and her legs were the shape of perfec-
tion. But the rhythm of her dance was very quick and spring-
ing ; it was in fact a boy’s dance, and she danced it as a girl
wanting to emphasise that she was a girl by performing a
characteristically male process. She ended standing on the tips
of her toes, with her left hand on her hip and her right forefinger
touching her chin, her eyebrows raised in coyness ; there was
never anything less androgynous.

But the attempt to juggle with the two aspects of human
sexuality was not the reason why this dance was distressing in
its confusion. It was a distress not new to me — I have felt it
often in America. I have at times felt suddenly sickened when
a coloured dancer I have been watching has used a step or gest-
ure that belongs to ” white ” dancing ; even if the instant
before they had been wriggling in an imitation sexual ecstasy
and passed into a dull undulation of the Loie Fuller sort or the
chaste muscular bound of a ballet movement, the second seemed
more indecent than the first, and I have often experienced the
same shock when I have seen white dancers borrow the idiom
of coloured dancers. There is nothing unpleasant in the gesture

CROATIA

known as “ cherry-picking ”, provided it is a negro or negress
who performs it ; the dancer stands with feet apart and knees
bent, and stretches the arms upwards while the Angers pull an
invisible abundance out of the high air. But it is gross and
revolting, a reversion to animalism, when it is performed by a
white person. That same feeling of inappropriateness amount-
ing to cultural perversion afflicted me slightly when I saw this
girl’s first dance, more severely when I saw her second, and to a
painful degree in the third, which she did to show us that she
could do more than mere folk-dances. It was that cabaret
chestnut, the dance of the clockwork doll, which is an imagina-
tive clichd of the stalest sort, never again to be more amusing
than the riddle ” When is a door not a door ? ” and this was the
most excruciating rendering of it that I have ever seen. This
Croat girl was so noble a creature that when she did a silly thing
she looked far sillier than the silly do. At the end of her dance
she ran across the shining floor and stood with her bare arm
resting on the golden wreath, her reflection broken loveliness at
her feet. “ Some day I will make them give me the first prize,”
she laughed. “ The poor little one," said Constantine, '' she
should be like an ikon, your wife will tell you.”

Zagreb VI

We went up the hill and looked at the archaic statues on the
porch of St. Mark's Church, which is a battered old spiritual
keep that has been built and rebuilt again and again since the
thirteenth century. " This old square is the heart of the town,”
said Constantine. ” Zagreb is the heart of Croatia, and St.
Mark’s Square is the heart of Zagreb, and I think that only once
did it fall, and then to the Tartars, to whom all fell. But now
they have renamed it the square of Stefan Raditch, after the
great leader of the Croat Peasant Party, who was shot in the
Belgrade Parliament in 1928. Here in Croatia they say we
Serbs did it, they say our King Alexander plotted it,” said
Constantine, his voice rising to a wail, " but it is not so. He was
shot by a mad Montenegrin deputy whom he had accused of
corruption. The Montenegrins are a Homeric people, they do
not understand modern life ; they think that if a man attacks
your honour you kill him, and it is well. But the Croats do not

96 BLACK LAMB AND GREY FALCON

know that, for they will never travel ; they have no idea of going
any further than Dalmatia. And why would King Alexander
want to kill Raditch ? He knew very well that if Raditch were
killed the Croats would go mad and would make with the Italians
and the Hungarians to kill him also. And so they did. And
that is a thing to remember when the King is blamed for sus-
pending the constitution. Always King Alexander knew that
he would be killed. It is proof of the lack of imagination of all
you English Liberals that you forget that a man’s policy is a
little different when he knows he is going to be killed.”

Down in the town we sat and drank chocolate in a caf^, till
Constantine said, “ Come you must go. You must not keep
Valetta waiting.” Since he was staying in the same hotel as we
were, and he looked tired, I said, “ Come back with us.” But
he would not. “ I will come later,” he said, and I am sure he
was afraid of meeting Valetta in the lounge and having to admit
that Valetta wanted to sec us but not him. The Serb, though he
seems tough and insensitive, is sometimes childishly hurt by
Croat coldness. Some French friends of mine who once attended
an International Congress of some sort at Zagreb were in the
company of a Serb, a middle-aged diplomat, when somebody
came into the room with the news that the Croat hospitality
committee was not going to ask the Serb delegates to the ban-
quet which was going to terminate the proceedings. The Serb
diplomat burst into tears. This story is the sadder because every
Croat, who thinks of the Serb as the gendarme who tortures
him, would disbelieve it.

When we got to our hotel we found Valetta waiting for us,
and we took him up to our room and drank plum brandy, pleased
to see him again though we had seen him so recently. He stood
by the window, pulled the curtains apart and grimaced at the
snow that fell aslant between us and the electric standards.
“ What a terrible Easter wc have given you 1 ” he laughed, and
raised his glass to his lips, smiling on us with the radiance that
is usually the gift of traitors, but means nothing in him but
kindness and good faith. He went on to apologise for the
violence with which he had spoken at lunch-time. “ I could not
help it,” he said. “ I know that Constantine is a wonderful man,
but he is all for Belgrade, and you will understand how we are
bound to feel about that. I am so afraid that as you are just
passing through the country, you will not see what we Croats

CROATIA

have to suffer. Of course everything is better since 1931, when
the King gave us back some sort of constitution ; and since the
King died it has improved still further. But it is still terrible.

“ You cannot think,” he said, as we all gathered round the
fire with our glasses on our knees, “ what the Censorship here is
like. Do you know that that little pamphlet about the Dictator-
ship of the Proletariat, which was a kind of three-cornered debate
between Stalin and Shaw and Wells, has been suppressed.
Think of the absurdity of it ! Of course that hardly matters, for
it is imported and it could not be called an epoch-making work,
but what does matter is that our own great people are persecuted.
You have heard of X. Y. ? He is a dramatist, and he is really
by far the greatest living writer we have. But he is a Com-
munist. Well, never can we see his plays at our theatre. They
simply will not let them be performed. And it matters not only
for us, but for him, because he is miserably poor. And he is not
allowed to make nr.oney any way, for when some people arranged
for him to give a lecture here in one of our big halls and had sold
all the tickets, the police prevented it twenty-four hours before,
on the ground that if there were a riot in the hall they could not
undertake to keep order. Now, that is sheer nonsense. We
Croats might riot about all sorts of things, but we would not riot
because X. Y. was giving a lecture. And really, I am not ex-
aggerating, all this means that the great X. Y. is starving.”

” But wait a minute,” said my husband. “ Is it only the
Yugoslavian Government that did not want X. Y. to speak ?
Is there not a chance that the Croat Clerical Party was also
rather anxious that he shouldn’t ? ” Valetta looked uncomfort-
able. “ Yes, it is so,” he said. " They would be against any
Communist, wouldn't they?" pressed my husband. “And
they would be in favour of a strict censorship, wouldn’t they ? ”

“ Yes,” said Valetta. “ Then when you fight for free speech
and a free press, you Croats are not only fighting the Serbs,
you are also fighting your own Clerical Party ? ” “ That is

so,” agreed Valetta ; and he added sadly, “ Our Clerical Party
is very violent.” There he was guilty of an understatement.
The Croatian Clerical Party is not a force that can easily be
regarded as proceeding from God. It is a party with a long
pedigree of mischief-makers, for it descends from the nineteenth-
century Party of the Right, which was led by Anton Starchevitch,
and its successor, the Party of Pure Right, which was led by

98 BLACK LAMB AND GREY FALCON

Dr. Josef Frank. Both these parties were violently bigoted in
their pietism, and professed the most vehement antagonism to
the Jews (which implied antagonism to Liberalism) and to the
Orthodox Church (which, as all Serbs are Orthodox, implied
antagonism to the Serbs).

There is to be noted, as evidence against the Austro-
Hungarian Empire, the neurotic quality of its rebels. It is as
if the population were so drugged and depleted that they never
raised their voice unless they were stung by some inner exaspera-
tion. It has been mentioned that Kossuth, the Magyar patriot
and scourge of the Slavs, was himself pure Slovak and had no
Magyar blood in his veins. Even so, Starchevitch, who loathed
the Serbs, was himself, as Constantine had told us beside his
grave, born of a Serb mother, and Dr. Frank, whose anti-
Semitism was frenzied, was a Jew. Such Slav patriots as these
were meat and drink to the Austro-Hungarian Empire, who
hated her Slav subjects. They made it easy for her to rule
according to that counsel of Hell, Divide et Impera. The
famous Ban Khuen-Hedervary, whose rule of Croatia was
infamously cruel, made a point of granting the Serb minority
in Croatia special privileges, so that the Croats would be
jealous of them, and there was thus no danger of Serbs and
Croats joining together in revolt against Hungarian rule.

The state of mind this produced in the populace can be read
in one of the numerous trials that disgraced the Austro-
Hungarian Empire so far as Croatia was concerned from the
beginning of the twentieth century till the war. This was the
famous “ Agram trial ” (Ag^am was the Austrian name for
Zagreb) which arraigned fifty-three Serbs of Croatia for con-
spiracy with the free Serbs of Serbia against the Austro-
Hungarian Empire. The charge was flagrant nonsense, cooked
up by the Ban, Baron Rauch, a stupid brute, and Count
Achrenthal, the Austrian Foreign Minister, who belonged to
the company of Judas and Fouche ; but for evidence they never
had to turn to Austrians or Magyars. Nearly all the two hundred
and seventy witnesses brought by the prosecution, who were
nearly all flagrantly perjured, W’ere Croats. They were all
willing to swear away the lives of their fellow Slavs to the
authorities they hated ; yet there is no difference between
Croats and Serbs except their religion.

The Croat Clerical Party, therefore, has always worked with

CROATIA

a motive power of anti-Serb hatred, which naturally created
its material. The Serbs retorted with as bad as they got, and
the Orthodox Church showed no example of tolerance to the
Roman Catholics. The greatest of nineteenth-century Slav
patriots of the pacific sort. Bishop Strossmayer, once announced
his intention of visiting Serbia, and the Serbian Government
had to make the shameful confession that it could not guarantee
his personal safety. But the greatest stimulus to anti-Serb
feeling has lain outside Croatia, in the Roman Catholic Church
itself. During the last sixty yearn or so the Vatican has become
more and more Ultramontane, more and more predominantly
Italian in personnel ; and since the war of 1914 it has become
more and more terrified of Communism. Can the Roman
Catholic Church really be expected to like Yugoslavia ? — to
like a state in which Croats, who used to be safely amalgamated
with Catholic Austrians and Hungarians, are outnumbered by
Orthodox Serbs, who are suspected of having no real feeling
of enmity towards Bolshevist Russia ?

There are two indications, one small and one massive, of
the Roman Catholic attitude to Yugoslavia. In all Slav
countries there have been for many years gymnastic societies
for young Slavs, called “ Sokols ” or " The Hawks ”, after an
original made in Czechoslovakia, where boys and girls are
given physical training and instructed in their nationalist
tradition and the duties of a patriot. These are, indeed, the
models from which the Italian Fascist! copied the Balilla and
Avanguardisti. After the war, the Roman Catholic Church
started rival societies called “ The Eagles ” in both Croatia
and Slovenia. It is extremely difHcult to see what motive there
can have been behind this move except to weaken the state
loyalty of the Roman Catholic Yugoslavs ; the Church could
not possibly fear that the Sokols would interfere with the
religious views of their members, for the Czech and Croatian
Sokols had always been predominantly Catholic. The more
important indication of the pro-Italian and anti-Slav attitude
of the Roman Catholic Church is her callousness towards the
unhappy Slovenes who were incorporated in Italy under the
Peace Treaty. These six hundred thousand people are the
worst treated minority in Europe except the German Tyrolese.

” Have bugs a nationality when they infest a dwelling ? That is
the historical and moral position of the Slovenes living within

TOO BLACK LAMB AND GREY FALCON

our borders,” once said the Popolo iP Italia. The 1929 Con-
cordat which Pope Pius XI signed with Mussolini did not
adequately protect the religious rights of the Slav minority,
and the Slovenes no longer enjoy the right, which they prized
highly, of using the Slovene liturgy in the churches. The Slav
so loves his language that this was a gesture of hostility to the
Slav soul.

It is, therefore, not sensible to trust the Roman Catholic
Croat to like and understand the Orthodox Serb, or even to
discourage the artificial hatred that has been worked up between
them in the past. “ Do you not think, Valetta,” said my
husband, ” that the Belgrade Government knows this, and there-
fore bargains with the Church, giving it assistance in its anti-
Communist campaign on condition that it keeps the anti-Serb
and Croatian Separatist Movement within bounds ? ” Valetta
hesitated. " It may be so,” he said, his long fingers fiddling
with the fringe of a cushion. “ And there is another thing,”
said my husband ; ” there is the present Concordat.” * He
paused. In 1937 all the Serbian parts of Yugoslavia were up
in arms because the Government had signed a Concordat with
Pope Pius which gave the Roman Catholic Church immense
advantages over the Orthodox Church : in any town where
the Roman Catholics were in an absolute majority over the
Serbs all the schools w'ithout exception were to be Roman
Catholic ; the child of a Roman Catholic mother and Orthodox
father was to be brought up as a Roman Catholic even if the
mother were received into the husband’s Church ; it was to
be far easier for Roman Catholic soldiers to practise their
religion than for the Orthodox soldiers, and so on. The terms
were so grossly favourable to the Roman Catholics that the
Government made it very difficult for the Serb public or for
foreigners to obtain the text of the Concordat. " Yes,” sighed
Valetta, " this wretched Concordat. We none of us want it
here, in Croatia, you know.”

“ Yes, I do not think you Croats want it,” said my husband,
" but your Church does. And don’t you feel that the Church
would never have been able to extort such terms from the
Belgrade Government if it had not been able to trade some

■ This Concordat was abandoned in 1938 because of the £eice opposition
of the Serbs and the lukewarm attitude of the Croats. It was entirely the
project of the Vatican.

CROATIA

lOI

favours in return ? I suspect very strongly that it has said to
the Belgrade Government, ‘ If you give us these concessions
we will see to it that the Croatian Peasant Party never seriously
menaces the stability of the Yugoslavian state.' ” Valetta
rocked himself uneasily, " Oh, surely not, surely not,” he
murmured. “ But for what other reason can the Belgrade
Government have granted this preposterous Concordat ? ”
pressed rny husband. " I cannot imagine,” said Valetta.
“ Oh, I suppose you are right I ” He rose and went to the
window and drew back the curtains, and looked again on the
bright snow that drove out of the darkness through the rays
of the street lamps.

" Is it not the tragedy of your situation here,” suggested
my husband, “ that you Croats are for the first time discovering
that your religion and your race run counter to one another,
and that you are able to evade that discovery by putting the
blame on the constitution of Yugoslavia ? The Croats, like all
Slavs, are a democratic and speculative people. You lived for
long under the Hapsburgs, whom you could blame for every
interference with individual liberty. Since the great pro-Croat
Strossmayer was a Bishop you could even think of the Roman
Catholic Church as the arch-opponent of the Hapsburgs, and
therefore the protector of liberty. Now the Hapsburgs are swept
away you should see the Roman Catholic Church as it is : not
at all democratic, not at all in favour of speculative thought ;
far more alarmed by the vaguest threat of social revolution than
by any actual oppression, provided it is of monarchial or
totalitarian origin, and wholly unsympathetic with any need
for free expression but its own. You should proceed to the
difficult task of deciding whether you can reconcile yourself
to this bias of the Church for the sake of the spiritual benefits
it confers upon you. But you are postponing this task by letting
the Church throw the blame for all its suppressions of free
speech and free press on Belgp-ade.”

" It is possible that you are right,” said Valetta, coming
back and taking his seat by the fire. “ Nothing is ever clear-
cut here." “ Do you never get down to a discussion of first
principles ? ” asked my husband. " This business of social
revolution, how is it regarded by the Croat politicians such as
Matchek of the Croat Peasant Party ? ” " We never speak of
such things, it is too soon,” said Valetta. " But if they want

VOL.1 H

loa BLACK LAMB AND GREY FALCON

to become a separate autonomous canton, surely they must
have some idea of the kind of society they want to found ? ”
“ No,” answered Valetta, " it is felt that it would be premature
to discuss such things. Oh, I know it is wrong and naive and
foolish, but that is how our people feel.”

That is how they had always felt, the Croat leaders. There
lay on the table a wad of papers which was the result of my
efforts, practised over some weeks, to discover what opinions
had been held by the greatest of Croat leaders, the murdered
Stefan Raditch. Those efforts had been fruitless, except so
far as they provided a proof of the essential unity of the Slavs.
For Raditch was the spit and image of Tolstoy. He talked
nonsense as often as not, but nobody minded ; they all listened
and felt exalted. It was his habit to speak in parables that were
apt to be childish and obscure, and his speeches sometimes
lasted for half a day and usually contained matter that was
entirely contrary to human experiences ; but his audiences
adored him as a sage and a saint, and would have died for him.
What was peculiarly Croat in him was his appeal to the peasants
as a representative of the country as against the town. Thb was
his own invention. Before the war it was possible to meet all
the other Croat politicians by frequenting the Zagreb caf6s
and restaurants, but both Raditch and his brother Anton, who
was almost as famous, made it a strict rule never to enter a
caK or a restaurant. This was to mark themselves off from the
bourgeoisie as specifically peasant. This would not have been
impressive in any other part of Yugoslavia than Croatia, where
alone is there a bourgeoisie which has existed long enough to
cut itself off from the peasantry. It would have evoked dislike
and impatience in Serbia or Bosnia or Macedonia, where the
poorest peasant is accustomed to sit in caf^s.

In the minds of his followers Raditch must have sown
confusion and little else. He spoke always as if he had a plan
by which the Croat peasant was instantly to become prosperous,
whereas there is no man in the world, not even Stalin, who
would claim to be able to correct in our own time the insane
dispensation which pays the food-producer worst of all workers.
The only practical step he ever proposed was the abolition of a
centralised Yugoslavian Government and the establishment of a
Federalism which would have left the economic position of the
Croat peasant exactly where it was. The rest was a mass of

CROATIA

ro3

violent inconsistencies. Probably nobody but St. Augustine
has contradicted himself so often or so violently.

He was pro-Hapsburg ; at the outbreak of the war he made
a superb speech calling on the Croats to defend their Emperor,
and his sentiments did not really change after the peace. But
he constantly preached that the Croats should form a republic
within the kingdom of Yugoslavia, on the grounds that the pro-
letariat was better off in a republic than in a monarchy. Not
only was he simultaneously pro-Hapsburg and republican, he
had friendly correspondence with Lenin and made a triumphal
progress through Russia. Though he expressed sympathy
with Bolshevist ideas he had stern race theories, which made
him despise many of the inhabitants of the southern parts of
Yugoslavia and reproach the Serbs bitterly for admitting to
Government posts such people as Vlachs, an ancient and quite
respectable shepherd tribe of the Balkans. It is said, however,
that he made the visit to Russia not from any ideological motive
but because like all Slavs he loved to travel, and though he had
lived in Vienna and Berlin and Paris (where he had taken
university degrees, for no more than Tolstoy was he a piece of
peasantry straight out of the oven) and had visited London and
Rome, he had never been in Moscow.

Whatever the reason may have been the visit did not help him
to give a definition to the Croat mind, particularly as shortly after-
wards he became a close friend of King Alexander of Yugo-
slavia, whom he alternately reproached for his interference with
Parliamentarianism and urged to establish a military dictator-
ship. Meanwhile he robbed the Croats of any right to complain
that the Serbs refused to let them take any part in the govern-
ment by ordering the Croat deputies to abstain from taking
their seats in the Belgrade Parliament, when the wiser course
would have been to leave them as an obstructionist and bargain-
ing body. Some idea of Raditch can be formed by an effort to
imagine an Irish politician with Parnell’s personal magnetism,
who was at one and the same time an agrarian reformer, a
Stuart legitimist, a republican, a Communist sympathiser, an
advocate of the Aryan race theory, and a close friend of the
King of England, to whom he recommended Liberalism and
Fascism as he felt like it, and who withdrew the Irish members
from St. Stephen’s while himself constantly visiting London.
It is no wonder that his party, even under his successor Matchek,

104

BLACK LAMB AND GREY FALCON

has formed only the vaguest programmes.

“ Nothing," said Valetta, " has any form here. Movements
that seem obvious to me when I am in Paris or London become
completely inconceivable when I am here in Zagreb. Here
nothing matters except the Croat-Serb situation. And that, I
own, never seems to get any further." " But this is something
very serious," said my husband, “ for a movement might rush
down on you here, say from Germany, and sweep away the
Croat-Serb situation and every other opportunity for debate.”
" You are perfectly right,” said Valetta. “ I know it, I know
it very well. But I do not think anything can be done.” And
of course nothing can be done. A great empire cannot bring
freedom by its own decay to those corners in it where a subject
people are prevented from discussing the fundamentals of life.
The people feel like children turned adrift to fend for themselves
when the imperial routine breaks down ; and they wander to
and fro, given up to instinctive fears and antagonisms and exalta-
tion until reason dares to take control. I had come to Yugoslavia
to see what history meant in flesh and blood. I learned now
that it might follow, because an empire passed, that a world full
of strong men and women and rich food and heady wine might
nevertheless seem like a shadow-show ; that a man of every
excellence might sit by a fire warming his hands in the vain hope
of casting out a chill that lived not in the flesh. Valetta is a
clean-cut person ; he is for gentleness and kindness and fastidi-
ousness against clod-hopping and cruelty and stupidity, and he
would make that choice in war as well as peace, for his nature is
not timid. But he must have something defined that it is possible
to be gentle and kind and fastidious about. Here, how'ever,
there is none, and therefore Valetta seems a little ghostly as he
sits by our hearth ; and I wonder if Zagreb is not a city without
substance, no more solid than the snowflakes I shall see next
time Valetta strolls to the window and pulls the curtain,
driving down from the darkness into the light of the street
lamps. This is what the consequences of Austrian rule mean
to individual Croats.

Zagreb VII

Politics, always politics. In the middle of the night, when
there is a rap on our bedroom door, it is politics. " It may be

CROATIA

105

a. telegram,” said my husband, springing up and fumbling for
the light. But it was Constantine. ” I am afraid I am late, I
am very late. I have been talking in the cafes with these Croats
about the political situation of Yugoslavia ; someone must tell
them, for they are quite impossible. But I must tell you that I
will be leaving to-morrow for Belgrade, very early, earlier than
you will go to Sushak, for they have telephoned to me and say
that I must go back, they need me, for there is no one who
works so well as me. I would have left you a note to tell you
that, but there was something I must explain to you. I have
spoken not such good things of Raditch who was killed and of
Matchek who is alive — you had better put on your dressing-
gown for I will be some time explaining this to you — but I want
to make you understand that though they are not at all clever
men and cannot understand that there must be a Yugoslavia,
they are chonest. They would neither of them take money
from the Italians and Hungarians. They and their followers
would spit on such men as go to be trained in terrorism at the
camps in Italy and Hungary. These were quite other men, let
me tell you. . . ."

Nevertheless we had woken as early as it was light, and my
husband said to me, ” We have never seen Mestrovitch’s statue
of the great Croat patriot. Bishop Strossmayer ; it is in the
public garden just outside this hotel. Let us go and look at it
now.” So we dressed in the dawn, said " Excuse me ” to the
charwomen who were scrubbing the hall, and found the Bishop
among the dark bushes and drab laurels of the unilluminated
morning. But his beauty, even under the handling of one whose
preference for rude strength must have been disconcerted by its
delicacy, was a light by itself. Mestrovitch had given up his
own individuality and simply reproduced the Bishop's beauty,
veiling it with a sense of power, and setting horns in the thick
wavy hair, after the manner of Michael Angelo’s Moses. I
would like to know if Mestrovitch ever saw his model : he
probably did, for Strossmayer lived until he was ninety in the
year 1905.

This dazzling creature had then completed lifty-six years of
continuous heroic agitation for the liberation of the Croats and as
the fearless denunciator of Austro-Hungarian tyranny. Because
of his brilliant performances as a preacher and a scholar he was
at thirty-four made the Bishop of Djakovo, a see which included

106 BLACK LAMB AND GREY FALCON

a vast stretch of the Slav-inhabited territoiy of the Empire ; and
he immediately declared himself as a passionate pro-Croat. It
is an indication of the wrongs suffered by the Croats that the
revenues of this bishopric were enormous, though the poverty
and ignorance of the peasants were so extreme that they shocked
and actually frightened travellers. He amazed everyone by
spending these enormous revenues on the Croats. While Hun-
gary was trying to Magyarise the Croats by forbidding them to
use their own language, and as far as possible deprived them of
all but the most elementary education, he financed a number
of secondary schools and seminaries for clerics, where the in-
structions were given in Serbo-Croat ; he endowed many South
Slav literary men and philologists, both Croats and Serbs, and,
what was most important, he insisted on the rights of the Croats
and the Slovenes to use the Slav liturgy instead of the Latin.
This last was their ancient privilege, for which they had bar-
gained with Rome at the time of their conversion by Cyril and
Methodius in the ninth century, when they were a free people.
He founded the University of Zagreb, which was necessary not
only for educational reasons but to give the Croats a proper
social status ; for in the Austro-Hungarian Empire, as in Ger-
many and in the United States, graduation at a university has
a class value ; it is the mental equivalent of a white collar.
Since the Croats had a university they could not be despised as
peasants. He was able to raise pro-Slav feeling in the rest of
Europe, for he was the friend of many distinguished French-
men, and he was the admired correspondent of Lord Acton and
Mr. Gladstone.

In all this lifelong struggle he had the support of no
authority. He stood alone. Though Pope Leo XIII liked and
admired him, the Ultramontane Party, which wanted to dye
the Church in the Italian colours, loathed him because he was
one of the three dissentients who voted against the Doctrine of
Papal Infallibility. On this matter he was of the same mind
as Lord Acton, but was at odds with his nearer Catholic neigh-
bours. These hated him because he defended the right of the
Slavs to have their liturgy said in their own tongue. They also
found him lamentably deficient in bigotry. When he sent a tele-
gram of brotherly greetings to the head of the Orthodox Church
in Russia on the occasion of the millenary of the Slav apostle
Methodius, his fellow-Catholics, particularly the Hungarians,

CROATIA

107

raged against this as an insult to the Holy See. The sense of
being part of a universal brotherhood, of being sure of finding
a family welcome in the furthest land, is one of the sweetest
benefits o£fered by the Roman Catholic Church to its members.
He had none of this enjoyment. He had only to leave his
diocese to meet coldness and insolence from those who should
have been his brothers.

The Atistro-Hungarian Empire could not persecute Stross-
mayer to his danger. The Croats loved him too well, and it was
not safe to have a belt of disaffected Slavs on the border of
Serbia, the free Slav state. But it nagged at him incessantly.
When he went to open the Slav Academy in Zagreb the streets
were thronged with cheering crowds, but the Government
forbade all decorations and illuminations. It took him fifteen
years to force on Vienna the University of Zagreb ; the statutes
were not sanctioned till five years after the necessary funds
had been collected. During the negotiations which settled the
terms on which Croatia was to submit to Hungary, after
Hungary had been given a new status by Elizabeth’s invention
of the Dual Monarchy, Strossmayer was exiled to France. At
the height of the trouble over his telegram to the Orthodox
Church about Methodius, he was summoned to Sclavonia, a
district of Croatia, where the Emperor Franz Josef was
attending manoeuvres ; and Franz Josef took the opportunity
to insult him publicly, though he was then seventy years of
age. This was a bitter blow to him, for he loved Austria, and
indeed was himself of Austrian stock, and he wished to preserve
the Austro-Hungarian Empire by making the Croats loyal
and contented instead of rebels who had the right on their
side. Again and again he warned the Emperor of the exact
point at which his power was going to disintegrate ; of Sarajevo.
He told him that if the Austrians and Hungarians misgoverned
Bosnia they would increase the mass of Slav discontent within
the Empire to a weight that no administration could support
and the Hapsburg power must fall.

But what is marvellous about this career is not only its
heroism but its gaiety. Strossmayer was a child of light, exempt
from darkness and terror. In person he resembled the slim,
long-limbed and curled Romeo in Delacroix’ Romeo and Juliet,
and the Juliet he embraced was all grace. The accounts given
by European celebrities of the visits they had to him read

left BLACK IAMB AMD GREY FALCON

richly. The foreigner arrived after a night journey at a small
station, far on the thither side of civilisation, and was received
by a young priest followed by a servant described as “ a pandour
with long moustachios dressed in the uniform of a hussar ”,
who put him into a victoria drawn by four dappled greys of the
Lipizaner strain which is still to be seen in the Spanish Riding
School at Vienna. Twenty-two miles they did in two hours
and a half, and at the end, near a small market town, reached
a true palace. It was nineteenth-century made, aiid that was
unfortunate, particularly in these parts. There is a theory that
the decay of taste is somehow linked with the growth of demo-
cracy, but it is completely disproved by the Austro-Hungarian
Empire which in its last eighty years grew in fervour for
absolutism and for Messrs. Maple of Tottenham Court Road.
But there was much here worthy of any palace. There was a
magnificent avenue of Italian poplars, planted by the Bishop
in his young days ; there was a superb park, landscaped by
the Bishop himself ; there were greenhouses and winter gardens,
the like of which the eastward traveller would not see again
until he had passed through Serbia and Bulgaria and Roumania
and had found his way to the large estates in Russia.

The guest breakfasted by an open window admitting the
perfume of an adjacent acacia grove, on prodigious butter
and cream from the home farm, on Viennese coffee and
rolls made of flour sent from Budapest. Later he was taken
to worship in the Cathedral w'hich the Bishop had built,
where peasants proudly wearing Slav costumes were hearing
the Slav liturgy. Then there was the return to the palace,
and a view of the picture gallery, hung with works of art which
Strossmayer had collected in preparation of the museum at
Zagreb. It is an endearing touch that he confessed he was
extremely glad of the Imperial opposition which had delayed
the foundation of this museum, so that he had an excuse
for keeping these pictures in his own home. After an excellent
midday dinner the Bishop exhibited his collection of gold and
silver crucifixes and chalices of Slav workmanship, dating from
the tenth to the fourteenth century, pointing out the high level
of civilisation which they betokened. Then the Bishop would
take the visitor round his home farm, to see the Lipizaner
horses he bred very profitably for the market, the Swiss cattle
he had imported to improve the local stock, and the model

CROATIA

109

dairy which was used for instructional purposes, and he would
walk with him in his deer park, at one corner of which he had
saved from the axes of the woodcutters a tract of primeval
Balkan forest, within a palisade erected to keep out the wolves
which still ravaged that part of the world. Before supper the
visitor took a little rest. The Bishop sent up to him a few reviews
and newspapers : The Times, La Revue des Deux Mondes, the
Journal des Mconomistes, La Nuova Antologia and so on.

After supper, at which the food and drink were again
delicious, there were hours of conversation, exquisite in manner,
stirring in matter. Strossmayer spoke perfect German, Italian,
Czech, Russian and Serbian, and a peculiarly musical French
which bewitched the ears of Frenchmen ; but it was in Latin
that he was most articulate. It was his favourite medium of
expression, and all those who heard him use it, even when they
were such scholars as the Vatican Council, were amazed by the
loveliness he extracted from that not so very sensuous language.
About his conversation there seems to have been the clear welling
beauty of the first Latin hymns. The Christians and he alike
were possessed by an ardour which was the very quality needed
to transcend the peculiar limitations of that tongue. It was an
ardour which, in the case of Strossmayer, led to a glorious un-
failing charity towards events. He spoke of his beloved Croatsi
of the victories of their cause, of his friendships with great men,
as a lark might sing in mid-air ; but of his struggles with Rome
and the Hapsburgs he spoke with equal joy, as a triumphant
athlete might recall his most famous contests. His visitors, who
had travelled far to reassure him in his precarious position,
went home in a |tate of reassurance such as they had never
known before.

This is not a character in life as we know it ; it belongs tD
the world that hangs before us just so long as the notes of a
Mozart aria linger in the ear. According to our dingy habit,
which is necessary enough, considering our human condition,
we regard him with suspicion, we look for the snake beneath the
flower. All of us know what it is to be moonstruck by charmers
and to misinterpret their charm as a promise that now, at last,
in this enchanting company, life can be lived without precaution,
in the laughing exchange of generosities ; and all of us have
found later that that charm made no promise and meant nothing,
absolutely nothing, except perhaps that their mothers’ glands

no BLACK LAMB AND GREY FALCON

worked very well before they were bom. Actually such men
often cannot understand generosity at all, since the eupeptic
quality which is the cause of their charm enables them to live
happily without feeling the need for sweetening life by amiable
conduct. They often refrain from contemptuous comment on
such folly because they have some use for the gifts of the
generous, but even then they usually cannot contain their scorn
at what seems a crazy looseness, an idiot interference with the
efficient mechanism of self-interest. Hence the biographies of
charmers are often punctuated by treachery and brutality of a
most painful kind. So we wait for the dark passages in Stross-
mayer’s story. But they do not come.

It appears that he turned on the spiritual world the same
joyous sensuality with which he chose chalices, Italian pictures,
horses, cattle, coffee and flowers. He rejected brutality as if it
were a spavined horse, treachery as if it had been chicory in the
coffee. His epicureanism did not fail under its last and supreme
obligation, so much more difficult than the harshest vow of
abstinence taken by ascetics : he preferred love to hate, and
made sacrifices for that preference. The sole companions left
to him were the Croats ; for them he had forsaken all others.
But he never hesitated to oppose the Croat leaders over certain
errors tending to malice and persecution, which sprung up here
as they are bound to do in every movement of liberation.
Though he risked everything to free the Croats from the
dominance of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, he would not
suffer any attempt to raise hatred among the Slavs against the
Austrians or the Hungarian peoples ; nor did he ever let ill be
spoken of the Emperor Franz Josef. Nor, thoygh he was a most
fervent propagandist for the Roman Catholic faith, would he
have any hand in the movement to persecute the Orthodox
Church which set the Croat against the Serb. He set himself
another problem of enormous delicacy in his opposition to
anti-Semitism, which was here an inevitable growth since the
feudal system kept the peasants bound to the land and thereby
gave the Jews a virtual monopoly of trade and the professions.
For thirty-six years, smiling, he dared deny his friends all
titbits to feed the beast in their bosoms, and lived in peril of
making them his enemies, though he loved friendship a^ve all
things. Out of the political confusion of Croatia which makes
for the endless embitterment and impoverishment I have

CROATIA

III

described, this creature had derived sweetness and well-being.
“ That is one of the most beautiful lives recorded in modem
history,” sud my husband. We left the lovely statue smiling
under the heavy rain.

On the railway station we fotmd the good Gregorievitch
and Valetta waiting to say good-bye to us. They stood side by
side on the platform, these two enemies, the early morning rain
dripping on their turned-up coat collars. Valetta laughed and
wriggled as the drops of water trickled down his neck, but
Gregorievitch merely bowed beneath the torrents. “ Nothing
is as it used to be,” he said stoically ; " even the seasons are
changed.” We did not wonder that he correlated his political
disappointments with the weather. The previous day we had
seen him link them with phenomena fated, it might have been
imagined, to be connected with absolutely nothing, to be them-
selves alone.

We had gone, Constantine and my husband and myself, to
take tea with Gregorievitch at his little flat on the hill beyond
the Cathedral. His apartment and his family were the work of
that God whose creations Tchekov described. Gregorievitch's
wife was nearly as tall and quite as thin as he was, and every
minute or so she put her hand to her head in a gesture of
apprehension so uncontrolled that it disturbed her front hair,
which rose in that tangled palisade called a transformation,
familiar to us on the brows of nineteenth-century minor royalties,
and finally fixed it at an angle of about sixty degrees to her
fine and melancholy features. This would have been comic
had she not been a creature moulded in nobility, and had it not
been probable that that gesture had become a habit in the early
days of her marriage, when Gregorievitch was as young as
Valetta, and there was a Hungarian Ban in Zagreb, and every
knock at the door might mean, and more than once had meant,
that police officers had come to arrest him.

There was also a daughter, very short, very plump, very
gay, an amazing production for the Gregorievitches. It was
as if two very serious authors had set out to collaborate and then
had published a limerick. We had heard about her : she wanted
to marry a young officer, but could not because Army regula-
tions forbade him to take a bride with a dowry below a certain
sum, and the bank in which Gregorievitch had put his savings
declared a moratorium. But she laughed a great deal, and

II3 BLACK LAMB AND GREY FALCON

wore a dress printed with little yellow flowers. That was not
all in the little flat. There was also a small white poodle, which
was pretty and neatly clipped, but old and careworn. It barked
furiously when we entered ; on Sunday afternoon it was
evidently accustomed to repose itself and considered visitors a
disorderly innovation. Quivering with rage, it watched while we
were shown the sitting-room and the little library which opened
off it through an arch. These rooms were full of heavy Austrian
furniture with stamped leather cushions and embroidered mats,
and they were suffused with a curious nostalgia, as if far older
people were living in them than was the case. In the library
several tables were entirely covered with thousands of type-
written pages : there must have been at least three-quarters
of a million words. Gregorievitch told us that this was the type-
script of his book on his war experiences, but it was only half
finished, and now he had begun to doubt if it was morally
justifiable to write it. To make conversation, since everybody
was very silent, my husband looked at the bookshelves, and
seeing that many of the volumes were well worn, said, “ I
suppose you love your books very much?” Gregorievitch
thought for some time and then said, “ No.” The conversation
dropped again.

“ Ah ! Ah 1 Ah ! ” cried Constantine, pointing his fore-
finger. We all wheeled about and saw that the poodle was re-
lieving itself on the carpet. The poor creature was making the
only protest it could concerning its shattered repose ; but it
must be admitted that the spectacle was extremely obscene, for
its froth of white curls over its clipped limbs recalled a ballerina.
Gregorievitch and his wife started forward with tragic faces.
The dog got up on its hind legs and clung on to Gregorievitch’s
hand, barking in weak defiance, putting his case about the
sacredness of Sunday afternoon. But Gregorievitch inclined
from his great height a face of solemn censure, as if it were a
child or even a man who were at fault, while his wife beat
the poodle with a small stick which had been brought from the
hall by the daughter, who was now no longer laughing. Gre-
gorievitch's expression reminded me of the words St. Augustine
once addressed to a Donatist Bishop whom he was persecuting :
“ If you could see the sorrow of my heart and my concern for
your salvation, you would perhaps take pity on your own soul.”

The dog was put out into the passage : but the incident could

CROATIA

”3

not be considered as ended. There remained in the middle
of the carpet the results of its protest. We endeavoured to take
the matter lightly, but we found that the Gregorievitches were
evidently hurt by our frivolity ; it was as if we had chanced to
be with them when a son of theirs had returned home drunk or
wearing the badge of the Croat Separatist Party, and we had
tried to tamper with the horror of the moment by laughter.
The atmosphere was tense beyond bearing ; so Constantine,
who had assumed an air of gravity, walked to the piano in the
manner of an official taking charge in an emergency, and played
a majestic motet by Bach, which recognises the fact of tragedy
and examines it in the light of an intuitive certainty that the
universe will ultimately be found to be reasonable. The Gre-
gorievitches, who had sunk into two armchairs facing each
other, sat with their arms and legs immensely extended before
them, nodding their heads to the music and showing signs of
deriving sober comfort from its message. There entered presently
with a brush and dust-pan an elderly servant, in peasant costume,
who was grinning from ear to ear at the joke the dog’s nature
had played on the gentry.

As she proceeded with her task Constantine passed into the
calmer and less transcendental music of a Mozart sonata, suit-
able to the re-establishment of an earthly decorum ; and when
she left the room he played a brief triumphal passage from
Handel and then rose from the piano. Madame Gregorievitch
bowed to him, as if to thank him for having handled a social
catastrophe with the tact of a true gentleman, and he acknow-
ledged the bow very much as Heine might have done. She then
began to converse with me on general topics, on the exception-
ally severe weather and its effect on the social festivities of
Zagreb. Meanwhile her husband took mine aside, ostensibly
to show him a fine print representing the death of an early
Croatian king, but really to murmur in a voice hoarse with
resentment that he had owned both the poodle’s father and
grandmother, and that neither of them would ever have dreamed
of behaving in such a way. “ Nothing, man or beast, is as it was.
Our ideals, think what has happened to our ideals . . . what
has happened to our patriots . .

But for dear Valetta it is not all politics. He is a man of
letters, he is a poet. What he could give the world, if there
could only be peace in Croatia 1 But how is there to be peace

114 BLACK LAMB AND GREY FALCON

in Croatia 7 It is said by some that it could be imposed over*
night, if the Serbs of Yugoslavia could nerve themselves to
grant Federalism on the Swiss model. That would change
the twilit character of Croatian history, it would give the
Croats a sense of having at last won a success, it would
give their national life a proper form. That, however, could
never be a true solution. But supposing Croatia got her
independence, and the peasants found they were still poor,
stu-ely there would be a movement towards some form of
social revolution ; and surely then the bourgeoisie and the con-
servatives among the peasants would try to hand their country
over to some foreign power, preferably Nasi or Fascist, for the
sake of stability. Surely, too, the Roman Catholic Church
would be pleased enough if Croatia left its union with Orthodox
Yugoslavia. And if that happened there would be no more
peace in Croatia, for either Gregorievitch or Valetta. They
were both true Slavs, and they would neither of them be able to
tolerate foreign domination, firstly because it was foreign, and
secondly because it was Fascist. Suddenly they looked to me
strange and innocent, like King Alexander of Yugoslavia in the
first part of the film, as he was in the boat and on the quay at
Marseilles. I pulled down the window so that 1 could see them
better, my two dear friends who were each other’s enemies, who
might yet be united to each other, far more closely than they
could ever be to me, by a common heroic fate. Such a terrible
complexity has been left by the Austro-Hungarian Empire,
which some desire to restore ; such a complexity, in which
nobody can be right and nobody can be wrong, and the future
cannot be fortunate.

1 DALMATIA T

Sushdk

The train went through a countryside dark with floods ;
and then there was no countryside, but something like
an abstract state of ill-being, a mist that made the land
invisible but was not visible itself. Then we pulled up to
mountains that were deep under new snow. Here trees became
curious geometrical erections ; white triangles joined each
branch-tip to the trunk. I saw one branch break under its
burden and fall in a scattery powder of what had wrecked it.
Valleys that I had seen in summer-time and knew to be rocky
deserts strewn with boulders the size of automobiles were level as
lakes and swansdown white. I grumbled at it, for I had wanted
my husband to see the crocuses that I had seen the year before
lying under the trees like dapples of mauve sunshine, and all
the red anemones springing among the lion-coloured stones. I
kept on saying, "It will be all right when we get to Dalmatia,
when we come to the coast.” But in the early afternoon we
caught sight of the Adriatic across barren snow-streaked hills,
and it looked like one of the bleaker Scottish lochs. Sky and
islands and sea alike were bruise-coloured.

Well, I will own it. The grimness of the day was not all to
blame. No weather can make the Northern Dalmatian coast
look anything but drear. The dreariness is so extreme that it
astounds like luxuriance, it gluts the mind with excess of
deprivation. The hills are naked. That exclusion of every-
thing but rock that we English see only in a quarry face is here
general. It is the landscape. Tracks lead over this naked
rock, but it is hard to believe that they lead anywhere ; it
seems probable that they are traced by desperate men fleeing

“5

ii6 BLACK LAMB AND GREY FALCON

from barrenness, and doomed to die in barrenness. And indeed
these bald hills mean a great deal of desperation. The rainfall
sweeps down their slopes in torrents and carries away the soil
instead of seeping into it and fertilising it. The peasants collect
what soil they can from the base of the hills and carry it up
again and pack it in terraces ; but there is not enough soil and
the terraces are often swept away by the torrents.

The human animal is not competent. That is the meaning
of the naked Dalmatian hills. For once they were clothed with
woods. These the earliest inhabitants of Dalmatia, the Illyrians
and Romans, axed with an innocent carelessness ; and the first
Slav settlers were reckless too, for they came from the in-
exhaustible primeval forest of the Balkan peninsula. Then
for three hundred years, from about the time of the Norman
Conquest to 1420, the Hungarians struggled with the Venetians
for the mastery of this coast, and the nations got no further
with their husbandry. Finally the Venetian Republic established
its claim, and thereafter showed the carelessness that egotistic
people show in dealing with other people’s property.

They cut down what was left of the Dalmatian forests to get
timbers for their fleet and piles for their palaces ; and they
wasted far more than they used. Venetian administration was
extremely inefficient, and we know not only from Slav com-
plaints but from the furious accusation of the Republic against
its own people that vast quantities of timber were purloined
by minor officials and put on the market, and that again and
again supplies were delivered at the dockyard so far beyond
all naval needs that they had to be let rot w'here they lay.
After this wholesale denudation it was not easy to grow the
trees again. The north wind, which blows great guns here in
winter, is hard on young plantations ; and the peasant as he
got poorer relied more and more on his goat, a vivacious animal
insensible to the importance of afforestation. The poor peasant
is also sometimes a thief, and it is easier to steal a young tree
than a fully grown one. So, for all the Yugoslavian Govern-
ment can do, the mainland and the islands gletim like monstrous
worked flints.

Bare hills, and young men that shout, both the product of
human incompetence, of misgovernment. That is the im-
mediate impression given by North Dalmatia. We met our first
young man very soon after we got to Sushak. We strolled for

DALMATIA

117

a time round the port, which has a brown matter-of-fact hand-
someness, and then we drove off to Trsat, a village two or three
miles up on the heights behind Sushak, which is visited by
countless thousands every year, for the sake of the church.

This is not interesting in itself, or even pleasing, except for
a charming triangular piazza in front of it, which is edged by
horse-chestnuts. But it has the supreme claim on the attention
of marking the site where the Holy House, in which the Virgin
Mary and Jesus and St. Joseph lived at Nazareth, rested for
three years and seven months, from the year 1291 to 1294, on
its way to Loretto, where it now is.

This is a story that enchants me. It gives a new meaning
to the phrase “ God moves in a mysterious way " ; and the
picture of the little house floating through space is a lovely
example of the nonsensical function of religion, of its power to
cheer the soul by propounding that the universe is sometimes
freed from the burden of necessity, which inspires all the best
miracles. It has often grieved the matter-of-fact. One English
priest named Eustace who visited Loretto at the beginning of
the nineteenth century wrote that many of the more sensible
of his faith were extremely distressed by the story, and “ suppose
the holy house to have been a cottage or log building long buried
in a pathless forest, and unnoticed in a country turned almost
into a desert by a succession of civil wars, invasions and revolu-
tions, during the space of ten or twelve centuries ”. It won’t
do. The place where the Holy House rested at Trsat is a very
short distance indeed from the castle where the Frankopan
family were living at the time. We must admit that sometimes
human beings quite simply lie, and indeed it is necessary that
they should, for only so can poets who do not know what poetry
is compose their works.

We pushed on to the Frankopan castle, which is the historical
equivalent of a stall in the Caledonian Market. It is a huddle
of round and square towers, temples and dungeons and dwelling-
houses packed within battlements under an excess of plants and
creepers due to neglect rather than luxuriousness. The earliest
masonry that has been found is Illyrian, and much is Roman,
of the time of Julius Caesar. We climbed a Roman tower to look
down on Sushak lying tawny by the blue sea, and the dark
ravine that runs up from the town through the foot-hills to
split a mountain range on the high sky-line.

VOL. 1

iiS BLACK LAMB AND GREY FALCON

We numbered seven, the litde party that was exploring the
castle ; ourselves, a middle-aged Frenchman and his blonde
soprano-ish wife, a German honeymoon couple, aggrieved and
agonised, as Germans often are nowadays, at contact with
foreigners, and a darkly handsome young man, a Dalmatian
on holiday from some town further down the coast, who had
early detached himself, and was seen only occasionally in the
distance, a silhouette on the edge of the round tower after we
had left it, or a shadow treading down the brambles at the
entrance to the dungeons. We forgot him totally in a great
wonder that came upon us when we were looking at the dwelling-
house made in the castle by an early nineteenth-century Austrian
general of Irish birth, Marshal Nugent. The Nugents had
the custom, like the English who live in the West Indies and the
early settlers in the Southern States, of burying their dead on
their premises. But whereas those other exiles buried their
dead in their gardens, the Nugents set theirs in niches of the
house, above ground, their coffins set upright behind slabs of
marble.

That I found puzzling. The only people I have ever heard
of as being buried upright are the ancient Irish, whose monotony
of mind made them wish to be discovered at the Day of Judg-
ment ready to face their enemies ; but the Nugents are English
by origin, and never saw Ireland till the days of Queen Elizabeth.
But we soon forgot that bewilderment in another. The
gardener was telling us that there was buried among the
Nugents a stranger, a something that he described in a rapid
phrase which we could not at first grasp. Incredulously we
repeated his phrase ; La zia del Signore Bernard Shaw 7 Si,
signore. We still felt a need for verification, and repeated it in
other languages ; La tante de Monsieur Bernard Shaw 7 Die
Tante von Herrn Bernard Shaw 7 Tetka od Gospodina Bemarda
Shawa 7 This was the hour for which Olendorff has waited a
hundred years. Always the gardener nodded ; and there, on
tite tomb, which indeed had a blue-veined elegance not in-
appropriate to Bernard Shaw himself, there was carved “ Jane
Shaw But before we could find out how she came to be there,
the dark young man was suddenly amongst us again, shouting
at the top of his voice.

He had found, it seemed, a notice behind some creepers,
on a wall, stating that the price of admission to the castle was

DALMATIA

119

five dinars, and we had all been charged ten. A dinar is about
a penny ; and I fancy that there was some reasonable explana-
tion of the incident, the tariff had changed. But the young
man was terribly enraged. All the resentment that most people
feel in their whole lives is not greater than what he felt on this
one point. " Zehn dinar ! " he cried, speaking in German so
that we might understand and collaborate with him in fury.
“ Zehn dinar ist viel, zehn dinar ist zu teuer, ist viel zu teuer ! ”
He switched back to Serbo-Croat, so that he could make his
accusations against the gardener with the unhampered vigour
of a man using his native tongue. " You are an Austrian ! ”
he screamed at him. “ You are an Italian ! ” Rage ran through
his whole body and out of his tongue. It was plainly an
exercised gift, a precious function proudly developed. His gift
mastered him, he could not endure the iniquity of this place ;
he had to leave us. Shouting protests to an invisible person,
leaping higher and higher as if to keep in contact with his own
soaring cries, he rushed away from us, away from the castle
of the Frankopans, towards the place where the house of
innocence had rested for what appears to have been the
insufficient period of three years and seven months.

" Maniac," said the Frenchman. “ Frightful ! ” said his
wife. “ Savages I ” said the German couple. They were
wrong. He was simply the product of Dalmatian history :
the conquest of Illyria by Rome, of Rome by the barbarians ;
then three hundred years of conflict between Hungary and
Venice ; then four hundred years of oppression by Venice with
the W’ar against Turkey running concurrently for most of that
time ; a few years of hope under France, frustrated by the
decay of Napoleon ; a hundred years of muddling misgovern-
ment by Austria. In such a shambles a man had to shout and
rage to survive.

Let me try to understand the plight of this people. Because
this is a story that no Westerner can know of himself, no English-
man, no American. Let us consider what the Frankopans were.
They are said to have been of Italian origin, to be affiliated
with the Frangipani family of Rome ; but that is almost
certainly a late invention. They were typical Dalmatian nobles :
of unknown origin, probably aliens who had come down on the
Slavs when thesp were exhausted by barbarian invasions, and
were themselves of barbarian blood. Certainly they owed their

120 BLACK LAMB AND GREY FALCON

ascendency not to virtue nor to superior culture, but to unusual
steadfastness in peeing that it was always the other man who
was beheaded or tossed from the window or smothered. They
lived therefore in an agony of fear. They were liable to armed
attack by Vienna or Hungary if ever they seemed to be favouring
one rather than the other. Their properties were temptations to
pirates. Their followers, and even their own families, were them-
selves living in continual fear, and were therefore apt to buy
their safety by betraying their overlord to his strongest enemy ;
so overlords could trust nobody. We know a great deal about
one Count Ivan Frankopan, in the fifteenth century. He was
the eldest of nine sons : the other eight all conspired against
him. To protect himself he used a device common in that age
of legalist division : he made the Venetian Republic his heir.
Thus it was not to the advantage of his brothers, or any other
private person, to assassinate him. But when he seized the
fortresses of two of his brothers he found that they were pro-
tected by a similar testamentary precaution ; they had made
the Count of Hungary their heir. He fled across the sea to an
island named Krk, which was his. Then he went mad. He
conceived the idea that he must have an infinite amount of
money to save him from disaster. He robbed his peasants of
their last coins. He murdered refugees who landed on his
island in flight from the Turk, for the sake of their little stores.
The Venetian Commissioner was ceded the island by its
horrified inhabitants on condition they took the poor lunatic
away.

The bare hills around the castle told us what followed that ;
four centuries of selfish exploitation. Then, with the French
occupation, there was hope. The gardener showed us with
pride a neat nineteenth-century neo-classical temple, built with
the fidelity to antique classicism that does not deceive the eye
for an instant, so obvious is it that the builders belonged to a
later civilisation that had learned to listen to orchestral music
and to drink tea from fine cups. There is a cross at the apex
of the pediment and two well-bosomed matrons sit on its slopes,
one decapitated by an idiot bomb dropped by one of
D* Annunzio’s planes when he was holding Sushak’s neighbour,
Fiume. Across the frieze of this temple is written “ Mir
Yunaka ", which I translated to my husbanfl perhaps more
often than was absolutely necessary, for I am delighted with my

DALMATIA isi

minute knowledge of the Serbian language. Peace to the
Heroes, it means. This temple was erected during the French
occupation which gave Dalmatia a peace for eight years. Eight
years out of all time. No longer.

For in 1806 Napoleon had still much of his youthful genius.
It made him take over this territory after he had defeated
Austria, and found the two provinces of High and Low Illyria
that comprised Croatia, and Dalmatia, and Slovenia, as well as
the Slav districts behind Trieste that are now Italian. He had
the idea of forming a civilised Slav state, to include in time the
Christian provinces of T urkey, which should make South- Eastern
Europe stable, pacific and pro-French. He made Marshal Mar-
mont the Governor of these Illyrian provinces, and it was an
excellent appointment. Though Marmont was a self-satisfied
prig, he was an extremely competent and honourable man, and
he loved Dalmatia. His passion for it was so great that in his
memoirs, his style, which was by nature dropsically pompous,
romps along like a boy when he writes of his Illyria. He fell
in love with the Slavs ; he defended them against their Western
critics. They were not lazy, he said indignantly, they were
hungry. He fed them, and set them to build magnificent roads
along the Adriatic, and crowed like a cock over the accomplish-
ment. They were not savages, either, he claimed : they had
had no schools, and he built them plenty. When he saw they
were fervent in piety, he fostered their religious institutions,
though he himself conceived faith as buckram to stiffen the
Army Regulations.

Marmont would have spent all his life in paternal service
of Dalmatia had his been the will that determined this phase
of history. But he could achieve less and less as time went on,
and when he resigned in 1811 the commerce of the country
was in ruins, the law courts were paralysed by corruption, the
people were stripped to the skin by tax-collectors, and there
was no sort of civil liberty. For he was only Marmont, a good
and just and sensible man whom no one would call great. But
none denied the greatness of Napoleon, who was neither good,
nor just, nor sensible.

There is a school of historians to-day who claim with semi-
erotic ardour that Napoleon’s benevolence and wisdom never
failed. It is hard to know how this view can survive a reading
of his correspondence with Marmont on the subject of the

113 BLACK LAMB AND GREY FALCON

Illyrian provinces. The style of his letters is curiously frivolous
and disagreeable. He addresses Marmont with the provocative
mock insolence of a homosexual queen ; and there is nothing
in the content to redeem this impression. By this time he had
forgotten everything about his empire except the crown. He
showed complete indifference to the welfare of the French troops
he had left in Dalmatia, and refused to sanction the expenditure
Marmont insisted was necessary to keep them healthy in this
barren coast of extreme weather, and he was completely un-
responsive to Marmont's desire to build up a virile and loyal
population and bring it into the fold of civilisation. As time
went on, he ignored Marmont’s letters altogether, and his
exchequer grudged every halfpenny sent to Dalmatia. Finally,
for no other purpose than pure offensiveness, he re-drafted the
constitution of the provinces and reduced the post of Governor
to a mere prefectship. Marmont could do nothing but resign
and go back to the Army. Yet he was a born colonial adminisr
trator, and this is one of the rarest forms of genius.

The men Napoleon sent to Dalmatia to replace Marmont
prove his odd sluttishness. First was General Bertrand, who
was later to share his Emperor’s captivity on St. Helena. He
deserved it for his treatment of the Dalmatians. To a race of
mystics, who had been granted a special revelation of
Christianity, because they had had to defend it against Islam,
he applied the petty and shallow prescriptions of French
eighteenth-century anti-clericalism. On these same mystics,
who were also, though the West lacked the scholarship to know
it, accomplished jurists, dowered with laws and customs spring-
ing from ancient tradition and beautifully adapted to local
necessities, he forced the new legislative cure-all, the Code
Napoleon. But Bertrand was far better than his successor.
Junot, the Duke of Abrantes, brought his career to its only
possible climax at the Governor’s palace in the delicious
Slovenian town of Lyublyana. He gave a State ball, and came
down the great marble staircase, under the blazing chandeliers,
stark naked and raving mad. But there was yet to come
Fouch^, the Duke of Otranto : a renegade priest, one of the
most pitiless butchers of the revolution, and in his capacity as
the Minister of Police the worst of all traitors, Judas only
excepted. He loathed Napoleon yet loved him, was never loyal
to him, yet could never bring himself to betray him finally.

DALMATIA

1*3

There was here some nasty coquetry of spirit, some purulent
corruption of love. Because his master was by then a beaten
man, Fouch6 came out to Dalmatia in a yeast of loyalty, and
indeed was inspired to glorious courage. In this far country,
while Napoleon’s future crumbled in the West, Fouch6 acted
all day the secure administrator and dawdled through the
routine of Governorship, and by night worked with frenzy
on the plans for evacuation. " Step by step, therefore, without
losses," writes one of his biographers, “ he withdraws to Venice,
bringing away intact or almost intact from the short-lived
Illyria, its officials, its funds, and much valuable material.”
All very marvellous ; but not by any accountancy could it be
judged honest to withdraw “ funds and much valuable material "
from that hungry country, which had beggared itself saving
the West from the Turkish invasion.

I did not wonder that the young man shouted as he ran
down the road, shouted as if he must go mad, did not the world
at last abandon its bad habit and resolve into mercy, justice
and truth.

Senj

The next morning we woke early, prodigiously early, so that
before we embarked on our little steamer we could cross the
bridge over the river that leads from Sushak to Fiume. There
we found a town that has the quality of a dream, a bad headachy
dream. Its original character is rotund and sunburnt and solid,
like any pompous southern port, but it has been hacked by
treaties into a surrealist form. On a ground plan laid out
plainly by sensible architects for sensible people, there is imposed
another, quite imbecile, which drives high walls across streets
and thereby sets contiguous houses half an hour apart by detour
and formality. And at places where no frontiers could possibly
be, in the middle of a square, or on a bridge linking the parts
of a quay, men in uniform step forward and demand passports,
minatory as figures projected into sleep by an uneasy conscience.

“ This has meant,” said my husband as we wandered through
the impeded city, “ infinite suffering to a lot of people,” and it
is true. Because of it many old men have said to their sons,
" We are ruined ”, many lawyers have said to widows, “ I am
afraid there will be nothing, nothing at all.” All this suffering

BLACK LAMB AND GREY FALCON

134

is due, to a large part, to English inefficiency. The Treaty of
London, signed by the Allies and Italy in 1915, was intended as
a bribe to induce the Italians to come into the war on the Allied
side, and it promised them practically the whole Adriatic sea*
board of the Austro-Hungarian Empire and all but one of the
Adriatic islands. It was made by Lord Oxford and Lord Grey,
and it reflected the greatest discredit on them and on the officials
of the Foreign Office. For it handed over to a new foreign yoke
the Slav inhabitants of this territory, who were longing to rise
in revolt against the Central Powers in support of the Allies :
and an Italian occupation of the Adriatic coast was a threat to
the safety of Serbia, who of all the Allies had made the most
sacriflces. These were good reasons why the Italians should not
have Dalmatia, and there were no reasons why they should, for
the Italian population was negligible.

Mercifully the Treaty of London was annulled at Versailles,
largely through the efforts of Lloyd George and President
Wilson. But it had done its work. It had given Italian greed
a cue for inordinacy ; it started her wheedling and demanding
and snatching. So she claimed Fiume on the ground that the
inhabitants were Italian : and proved it by taking a census of
the town, excluding one part which housed twenty-five per
cent of the population. The I talian Government was discouraged
by European opinion from acting on that peculiar proof, but there-
after D’ Annunzio marched his volunteers into Fiume, in an
adventure which, in mindlessness, violence and futility, exactly
matched his deplorable literary works, and plunged it into
anarchy and bloodshed. He was made to leave it, but the
blackmail had been started. Yugoslavia had to buy peace, and
in 1920 she conceded Italy the capital of Dalmatia, Zara, three
Dalmatian islands, and the hinterland behind Trieste, and she
entered into arrangements concerning Fiume which, in the end,
left the port as it is.

All this is embittering history for a woman to contemplate.
I will believe that the battle of feminism is over, and that the
female has reached a position of equality with the male, when I
hear that a country has allowed itself to be turned upside-down
and led to the brink of war by its passion for a totally bald
woman writer. Years ago, in Florence, I had marvelled over
the singular example of male privilege afforded by D’ Annunzio.
Leaning from a balcony in the Lung’ Arno 1 had looked down on

DALMATIA

las

a triumphal procession. Bells rang, flags were waved : flowers
were thrown, voices swelled in ecstasy : and far below an egg
reflected the rays of the May sunshine. Here in Fiume the bald
author had been allowed to ruin a city : a bald-headed authoress
would never be allowed to build one. Scowling, I went on
the little steamer that was taking us and twenty other passengers
and as many cattle and sheep southwards to the island of Rab,
and we set off in a cold dither of spray.

The bare hills shone like picked bones. I fell asleep for we
had risen at six. Then my husband shook me by the shoulder
and said, “ You must come up on deck. This is Senj.” I
followed him and stared at the port, which was like many others
in Spain and Italy : from the quayside high buttoned-up houses
washed in warm colours and two or three campaniles struggled
up a hill towards a ruined fortress, the climbing mass girt in by
city walls. I groaned, remembering that the climbing mass
certified man to be not only incompetent but beastly, that here
the great powers had mocked out of their own fulness at another’s
misery and had shown neither gratitude nor mercy.

Senj was the home of the Uskoks. These are not animals
invented by Edward Lear. They were refugees. They were
refugees like the Jews and Roman Catholics and Liberals driven
out by Hitler. They found, as these have done, that when one
door closed on them others that should have been open suddenly
were not. These were driven out of their homes, out of the
fellowship of Christendom, out of the world of virtue, into an
accursed microcosm where there was only sin. They were
originally Slavs of blameless character who fled before the
Turks as they swept over Bulgaria and Serbia and Bosnia, and
formed a strange domestic army, consisting of men, women and
children, that fought many effective rearguard actions over a
period of many years. Finally they halted at the pass over the
Dalmatian mountains, behind the great port of Split, and for
five years from 1532 they held back the Turks single-handed.
Then suddenly they were told by their Christian neighbours to
abandon the position. Venice, which had just signed a pact with
Turkey, and was a better friend to her than Christian historians
like to remember, convinced Austria that it would be wise to let
Turkey have the pass as a measure of appeasement.

Then the Uskoks came down to the coast and settled in this
little town of Senj, and performed a remarkable feat. Up till

126 BLACK LAMB AND GREY FALCON

then they had displayed courage and resolution of an unusual
order. But they novr showed signs of genius. Some of them
were from the southern coast of Dalmatia, down by Albania,
but most of them were inland men. In any case they can have
had few marine officers. But in a short time they had raised
themselves to the position of a naval power.

This was not a simple matter of savage daring. The Uskoks
had unusual talent for boat-building. They devised special craft
to suit the special needs of the Dalmatian coast, which re-
sembled that with which the ancient Illyrians used to vex the
Roman fleet : light boats that could navigate the creeks and be
drawn up on the beach where there was no harbour. They also
developed extraordinary powers of seamanship which enabled
them to take advantage of the situation of Senj. Just here the
channel between the mainland and the island of Krk widens to
ten miles or so, which makes a fairway for the north wind, and it
meets another channel that runs past the tail of the island to the
open sea, so the seas roar rougher here than elsewhere on the
coast. It was so when we came into Senj ; a wave larger than
any we had met before slapped against the quay. The Uskoks
developed a technique of using this hard weather as a shield
against their enemies, while they ran through it unperturbed.
Therefore they chased the Turkish ships up and down the
Adriatic, stripped them and sank them ; and year by year they
grew cleverer at the game This success was amazing, consider-
ing they numbered at most two thousand souls. If the Venetian
fleet had been directed by men of the quality of the Uskoks the
Turks might have been driven out of European waters, which
would have meant out of Europe, in the middle of the sixteenth
century.

Venice, however, was in her decline, which was really more
spiritual than economic. Her tragedies were due to malad-
ministration and indecisive politics rather than to actual lack
of means.

She tried to placate Turkey in another way. She stopped
attacking her at sea. To the Uskoks this capitulation of the
great Christian powers must have seemed the last word in
treachery. They had, within the memory of all those among
them who were middle-aged or over, been driven from their
homes by the Turks in atrocious circumstances ; and they had
believed that in harrying the Turks they were not only avenging

DALMATIA

«7

their wrongs but were serving God and His Son. They had
often been blessed by the Church for their labours, and Gregory
XIII had even given them a large subsidy. But now they were
treated as enemies of Christendom, for no other crime than
attacking its enemies. And not only were they betrayed in the
spirit, they were betrayed in the body. How were they to live ?
Till then they had provided for themselves, quite legitimately
since the Turks had dispossessed them of all their homes, by
booty from Turkish ships. But now all that was over. The
Christian powers had no suggestions to make. The plight of a
refugee, then as now, provoked the feeling that surely he could
get along somehow. There was nothing for the Uskoks to do
except defy Venice and Austria, and attack their ships and the
Turks’ alike.

It seems certain that to see the story of the Uskoks thus is
not to flatter them. For nearly thirty years they lived in such a
state of legitimate and disciplined warfare that they attacked
only Turkish ships. It is not until 1566 that there is the first
record of an Uskok attack on a Christian ship. Thereafter, of
course, the story is very different. They became gangsters of
the sea. They developed all the characteristics of gunmen : a
loyalty that went unbroken to the death, unsurpassable courage,
brutality, greed and, oddly enough, thriftlessness. Just as a
Chicago racketeer who has made an income of five figures for
many years will leave his widow penniless, so the Uskoks, who
helped themselves to the richest loot the sea ever carried, always
fell into penury if they survived to old age. Also they were
looted, as thieves often are, by the honest. It is said that they
bribed the very highest Austrian officials, even in the seat of
government itself at Graz ; and that a Jewish merchant might
recognise there on a great lady’s breast a jewel which he had
seen snatched by a robber’s hand on the Adriatic. Because of
this traffic, it is alleged, the Austrians did little to restrain the
Uskoks after they had become pirates. In any case it is certain
that Venetian officials often bought the Uskoks' prizes from
them and marketed them at a profit in Venice

In a very short time the moral confusion of these people was
complete. At Christmas and Easter every year there were ex-
peditions financed by the whole of SenJ. Everybody, the officials,
the soldiers, the private families, the priests and monks, paid
their share of the expenses and drew a proportionate share of the

128 BLACK LAMB AND GREY FALCON

booty. The Church received its tithe. This would be funny if
murder had not been a necessary part of such expeditions, and
if barbarity did not spread from heart to heart as fire runs from
tree to tree in a forest in summer. Some of the later exploits of
the Uskoks turn the stomach ; they would knife a living enemy,

, tear out his heart, and eat it. Not only did the perpetrators
of these acts lose their own souls, but the whole level of Slav
morality was debased, for the Dalmatian peasant knew the
Uskok’s origin and could not blame him. And the infection
spread more widely. All the villains of Europe heard that there
was good sport to be had in the Adriatic, and the hardier hurried
to Senj. It testifies to the unwholesomeness of Renaissance
Europe that some of these belonged to the moneyed classes.
When a party of Uskoks were hanged in Venice in i6i8 nine
of them were Englishmen, of whom five were gentlemen in the
heraldic sense of the word, and another was a member of one
of the noblest families in Great Britain.

It is sometimes very hard to tell the difference between history
and the smell of skunk. Both Venice and Austria used the de-
gradation of these men as extra aces in their cheating game.
The Austrians pretended to want to suppress them, but rather
liked to have them harrying Venice. Venice sacrificed them to
her friendship with Turkey, but that friendship was a sham ;
she never really wept over those Turkish ships. Also she liked
to have a legitimate source of grievance against Austria. The
insincerity of both parties was proven by their refusal to grant
the Uskoks’ demand, which was constantly presented during a
period of fifty years, that they should be transported to some
inland place and given a chance to maintain themselves either
by tilling the soil or performing military duties. Again and
again the poor wretches explained that they had no means of
living except by piracy, and that they would abandon it at once
if they were shown any other way of getting food. But Venice
and Austria, though one was still wealthy and the other was
becoming wealthier every day, haggled over the terms of each
settlement and let it go. Once there was put forward a scheme
of selling the forests of pine and beech that in those days still
grew round Senj, and using the proceeds to build fortresses on
the Austrian frontiers which would be manned by Uskoks. It
fell through because neither power would agree to make an
initial payment amounting to something like fifty pounds. At

DALMATIA

1*9

the same time the Uskoks were not allowed to go to any country
which was prepared to make room for them. They were strictly
forbidden to enlist in foreign service. They were shut up in
piracy as in jail by powers that afTected to feel horror at their
crimes.

In the end their problem was settled in the course of an odd
war between Austria and Venice, in which the Uskoks were used
as a pretext by several people who wanted a light. This war
which was about nothing and led to nothing, lasted three years
and must have brought an infinity of suffering to the wretched
Dalmatian peasant. But, mercifully, as it was supposed to be
about the Uskoks the Peace Treaty had to deal with them. A
good many were hanged and beheaded and the rest were trans-
ported, as they themselves had requested for fifty years, to the
interior. But the method of their transport was apparently
unkind. There were no stout fortresses built for them or hope-
ful villages, for no certain trace of them can be found Some
say their descendants are to be found on the Alps at the very
southern end of Austria ; others have thought to recognise
them on the slopes of a mountain in North Italy. It is to be
feared that their seed was scattered on stony ground. That is
sad, for the seed was precious.

We went down to the little dining-saloon and had a good,
simple, coarse, well-flavoured luncheon. Opposite us sat a young
man, handsome and angry, the very spit and image of the one at
Trsat who had cried out to his God about the ten dinars ; and
indeed they were of the same breed. For this one thrust away
his plate as soon as it was brought to him with a gesture of fury.
" This soup is cold ! ” he shouted, his brows a thick straight line.
" This soup is as cold as the sea ! ” But he was not shouting at
the soup. He was shouting at the Turks, at the Venetians, at
the Austrians, at the French and at the Serbs (if he was a Croat)
or at the Croats (if he was a Serb). It was good that he shouted.

I respected him for it. In a world where during all time giants
had clustered to cheat his race out of all their goods, his fore-
fathers had survived because they had the power to shout, to
reject cold soup, death, sentence to piracy, exile on far mountain
slopes.

130

BLACK LAMB AND GREY FALCON

Rab

The sea was green and hard as glass ; the crests of the waves
were ekevaux de frise between us and a horizon of pure, very
pale-green light, and dark-bronze islands. Our destination,
the isle of Rab, lay before us, its mountains bare as Krk, its
shores green as spring itself. As we came closer to it my
husband said, " It is only scrub, of course, low woods and
scrub." But a little later he exclaimed, " Only scrub, indeed !
Just smell it ! Well, I have heard of this but I never quite
believed it." It was still distant by half a mile or so, but the
scent of myrtle and rosemary and thyme was as strong and
soothing a delight as sunshine. Through this lovely invisible
cloud we rode slowly into the harbour of Rab, and found our-
selves in one of the most beautiful cities of the world. It is
very little. One can see it all at once, as if it were a single
building ; and that sight gives a unique pleasure. Imagine
finding a place where one heard perpetually a musical phrase
which was different every time one moved a few steps, and was
always exquisite. At Rab something comparable happens to
the sight. The city covers a ridge overlooking the harbour. It
is built of stone which is sometimes silver, sometimes at high
noon and sunset rose and golden, and in the shadow sometimes
blue and lilac, but is always fixed in restraint by its underlying
whiteness. It is dominated by four campanili, set at irregular
intervals along the crest of the ridge. From whatever point
one sees it these campanili fall into a perfect relationship with
each other and the city. We sat under a pine tree on the shore
and ate oranges, and the city lay before us, making a statement
that was not meaningless because it was not made in words.
There we undressed and swam out fifty yards, and we stopped
and trod water, because the town was making another lovely
statement. From every yard of the channel that divides it
from its neighbour islands, from every yard of the roads that
wind among the inland farms and olive terraces to the bald
mountains in the centre of the island, the city can be seen
making one of an infinite series of statements. Yet it achieves
this expressiveness with the simplest of means : a grey hori-
zontal oblong with four smaller vertical oblongs rising from it.
Euclid never spoke more simply.

THE WALLS OF RAB

THE CATHEDRAL AT RAB

DALMATIA

*3*

This island is within sight of the barbarised home of the
Frankopani, is set in a sea polluted by the abominations of the
Turks and the Uskoks. It is therefore astonishing that there
is nothing accidental about the beauty of Rab ; that in the
fissure of this bare land there should be art and elegance of the
most refined and conscious sort. Though Rab is no larger
than many villages, it is a city, a focus of culture, a fantasy
made by man when he could do more with his head and hands
than is absolutely necessary for survival. There is a noble white
square by the harbour, where balconies are supported by tiers
of three lions set one upon another, pride upon pride, and
facades are aristocratic in their very proportions, being broad
enough to be impressive yet not too broad for respect towards
neighbouring properties. From this square streets run up to
the ridge of the town or along its base ; and the richness of the
doorways and windows and columns makes each seem a passage
in some private magnificence. In one doorway stone grows as
fern fronds above the pilasters, enwreaths with flowers a coat
of arms, and edges the shield above with forms delicate as
wheat-ears. Above another doorway, opening into a cloistered
garden, cupids hold ropes of laurel flowing from a shield and
helmet on which an eagle broods. One cupid holds forth his
rope of laurel with a gesture that expresses the ambition of the
Renaissance. “ To humanity be the kingdom, the power, and
the glory." Each of these doorways has begun to feel the weight
of five centuries ; in the first the columns are straddling apart,
in the second a stone has fallen and left a gap through which
a flower pokes a scarlet head. But this shabbiness, which is not
at all tainted by dirt, is very much what a great emperor might
permit in the homelier parts of his palace.

There is the same sense of private magnificence about the
Cathedral of Rab. On the ridge there is a little square, with
bastions and cliffs falling deeply to the shore on the further side ;
between the tall soldierly flowers of the aloes and the swords
of their leaves the eyes fall on the sea and its scattered islands.
Here stands the cathedral built of rose and white marble in
alternate courses, ornamented with blind arches of a lovely
span. It is no bigger than many a private chapel ; and it
has an air of not knowing what strangers are. That was the
theory. Without, the horror, the pirate, the Turk ; within, an
enclosed community within an enclosed community, a small

13* BLACK LAMB AND GREY FALCON

city upon an island. One arranges one’s house with a certain
lavishness and confidence when one believes that it is going to
be visited only by familiars, and this cathedral is therefore at
once domestic and elegant. It is Venetian in spirit, which is
not to say that it is actually the work of Venetian hands : our
English Norman and Gothic churches derive from France but
were not built by Frenchmen. It recalls the bone-white archi-
tectural backgrounds of Carpaccio and Bellini, that delicate
frame of a world which is at once pious and playful, luxurious
and simple-minded. Its interior might have been designed by
a maker of masques, who with infinite reverence conceived the
high mass as the supreme masque. The stage is set high above
the onlookers : six high steps lead up to the choir, where stalls
of heraldic pomp indicate that those who sit there are the
servants of a great lord, and another flight mounts to the altar,
which is sheltered and magnified by a tall baldacchino.

This is a part of an older church, a thousand years old, built
in the time of Slav independence. It is one of the utmost
elegance imaginable. Its six supporting columns are of fine
cipollino marble, and its canopy is carved from one great block
of stone, but it is weightless as a candle-flame because of the
exquisiteness of its design and execution. Round its six arches
are garlands carved more finely than the emblems on the
patricians’ doorways in the town below, which is as it should
be, since this is the palace of the patrician above all patricians.
The pyramided roof of the baldacchino is painted a tender red,
the vault above it is painted a tender blue, just such colours as
grace the festivities of a much later Venice in the paintings of
Paolo Veronese. The community that built this cathedral was
so civilised that it could conceive a God who would be pleased
not by the bowlings of His worshippers and the beating of their
breasts, but by their gaiety, by their accomplishment, by their
restraint and dignity. At one time the island of Rab paid an
annual tribute to the Doge of ten pounds of silk. In this
building it paid a tribute of silken elegance to the Doge of
Doges.

Because it was noon they came to close the cathedral. We
went out blinking into the sunlight, which for a moment was
falling strong between thunderclouds ; and a group of women
smiled at us and gave us some greetings in Italian, though they
were visibly not Italian. For they were completely lacking in

Dalmatia tij

Latin facility. They had that fiat, unfeigned, obstinate look
about the cheek-bones, which is the mark of the Slav, and their
bodies were unpliable. But they were not of a harsh race that
had usurped the home of gentler beings perished through
gentleness. These people, and none other, had made Rab.
Over the cathedral doorway the builders had set a Pietk, a
Madonna holding her dead son in her arms, and she was as
these women. With a stiff spine, with her chin high, she sits
and holds a Christ that is dead, truly dead — for if he were
not, where would be the occasion for all the excitement ? —
dead as mutton, dead as the skinned lamb which one of the
women was holding like a baby. This Madonna is as sorrowful
as sorrow ; her son is dead as death. There is here the fullest
acceptance of tragedy, there is no refusal to recognise the essence
of life, there is no attempt to pretend that the bitter is the
sweet. One must not pull wool over the eyes if one is in danger ;
for it goes badly with one when the sword falls unless one has a
philosophy which has contemplated the fact of death.

Above our heads a bell gave out the hour, and I jumped
with surprise. The women laughed indulgently, sleepily ; there
was a semblance of noon heat settling down on the city. It was
the Campanile of St. Christopher, the most beautiful of the
four towers of Rab. It is said of the big bell, as it is said of
many old ones, that when it was being cast the citizens came
to the foundry and cast their gold and silver ornaments into the
melting-pot ; and certainly its tone is much mollified for metal,
it might be the voice of a dove that had grown old smd great
and wise. Leaning back against the wall of a palace and looking
up at the campanile my husband said ; " Look at the thing.
It is made on a Euclidean recipe. There are four storeys.
On the lowest is a doorway. On the next are on each wall two
windows, each divided by a shaft. On the next there are two
windows, each divided by two columns, on the highest there is
one window divided by tlu-ee columns; above that is a balustrade
of seventeen columns, every fifth one somewhat stouter. Above
is the spire. How did that man who built this tower seven
hundred years ago know that these severe shapes would affect
my eyes as a chime of joy-bells would affect my ear ? He
must have been a man of incredible cunning to make this stony
promise of a fluid world, this geometric revelation of a universe
in which there is not an angle."

VOL. 1

134 black lamb and GREY FALCON

Out in the country round the city of Rab there are no
revelations. There is a mystery. It is formulated also in
stone, but not in worked stone, in the terrible naked stone of
Dalmatia, in the terrible earth that here lies shallow and infirm
of purpose as dust, and in the terrible faces of the people, who
are all like crucified Christs. Everywhere there are terraces.
High up on the bare mountains there are olive terraces ; in the
valleys there are olive terraces ; in the trough of the valleys
there are walled fields where an ordinary crop of springing corn
or gprass strikes one as an abnormal profusion like a flood. On
these enclosures black figures work frenetically. From a grey
sky reflected light pours down and makes of every terrace and
field a stage on which these black figures play each their special
drama of toil, of frustration, of anguish. As we passed by on
the stony causeway, women looked up at us, fium the fields,
their faces furrowed with all known distresses. By their sides
lambs skipped in gaiety and innocence, and goats skipped in
gaiety but without innocence, and at their feet the cyclamens
shone mauve ; the beasts and flowers seemed fortunate because
they are not human, as those who have passed within the breath
of a plague and have escaped it. From the olive terraces the
men looked down with faces contracted by the greatest effort
conceivable ; and the trees they stood upon, though the droughts
of summer and the salt hurricanes of winter had twisted them
to monstrous corkscrews, also seemed fortunate by comparison.
Sometimes we met people on these causeways who begged from
us without abjectness, without anything but hunger. Their lean
hands came straight out before them. Their clothes asked alms
louder than they did, making it plain that here were the poorest
of creatures, peasants who had not the means to make a peasant
costume, to proclaim that in their village they had skill and
taste and their own way of looking at things. They were un-
differentiated black rags.

Here out in the country, the islanders spoke Serbo-Croat ;
half an hour from the city gates we found peasants who knew
only a few words of Italian. These are true, gaunt Slavs,
wholly without facility, with that Slav look of being intuitionally
aware of the opposite of the state in which they found them-
selves at the moment, and therefore being more painfully affected
by it if it were disagreeable. The poor have at the back of their
sunken eyes a shining picture of wealth, the sick know what it

DALMATIA

135

is to be sound, and as the unhappy weep the scent of happiness
dilates their nostrils. This unfamiliar way of bearing misery
gave them a certain unity in our eyes ; but there were also
marked differences between them, which were terrible because
they depended to such a startling degree on the geographical
variations, necessarily not very great, which can be observed
here within a few hundred yards of each other. That we
noticed on our first walk in the island. We followed a stony
causeway along the barren lower slopes of a ridge that ran
towards an estuary, and there the people who were working on
the fields and who begged from us were thin and slow-moving,
glaring in misery. Then we came to a village set on firm
ground above the estuary, which could draw on the wealth of
both the sea and the rich earth among the river’s mouth ; and
here the people were stouter and brisker.

And so it was throughout our walk, rich, poor, rich, poor.
Once we found ourselves on the shore of a land-locked bay,
broken with a magnificent cliff, round which there was plainly
no road at all. We came on an old man in patched clothes
sitting under a pine tree watching some goats, on a little head-
land made into a harbour by a few blocks of stone. He con-
cerned himself in our plight as if he were our host. It was
inconceivable that he could have begged from us. There came
presently a young fisherman in a rowing-boat, who rowed us
across waters that were swimming with the first sunset colours
to the village on the other side of the bay, and took his just
fare, and would not have taken money for any other cause-
But when we had walked half a mile or so from where we
landed we were on barren and wind-swept lands again, and we
met an old man, who was like the old man on the headland
as one pea and another, and he was begging shamelessly and
very pitifully. He had gathered some flowers from the hedge-
rows and stood there in the dusk on the chance of some tourist
coming along, which might justly be called an off-chance, as all
the tourists on the island were middle-aged Germans who never
moved a mile from the city. All this part was very poor. We
met ragged and listless men and women hurrying through the
twilight without zest, leaden-footed with hunger. Nevertheless
there bloomed suddenly before us the lovely gallant human
quality of fantasy, which when necessity binds it down with
cords leaps up and exercises its choice where it would have

136 BLACK LAMB AND GREY FALCON

seemed there was nothing to choose, which in destitution dares
to prefer this to that and likes its colours bright. We came on
a g^up that was standing lapped in pleasure all across the
causeway in front of a young man who was showing off his new
suit. They were peering at it and fingering it and exclaiming
over it, as well they might, for though it was conventionally
tailored in Western fashion it was cut from emerald velveteen.
It was the time of dusk when colours liquefy and clot, when in a
garden the flowers become at once more solid and more glowing ;
the suit was a pyre of green flame, about which the black figures
pressed insubstantially, yet with ecstatic joy.

The poverty of the island was made plainer still to us the
next day. Our first expedition had been over the northern part
of the island, which is more or less protected from the north
wind by high ground ; but this time we walked to the south,
where there is no shelter from the blast that rakes the channel
between Rab and its neighbour island. Here is a land and a
people that are not only grim but desperate. Most of the
houses are very large ; some of them are almost fortress size,
foif the customs of land tenure make it convenient for a whole
family to live under the same roof, even to several degrees of
cousinship. There is something specially terrifying about a
house that is very big and very poor, a Knole or Blenheim of
misery. At the dark open door of one such home, that seemed
to let out blackness rather than let in light, there waited a boy
of seven or eight with flowers in his hand for the tourist. My
husband thrust down into his pocket, brought up three dinars
and one half-dinar, and peered to see what they were. The
child shuddered with suspense, broke down, put out his little
hand and snatched, and ran into the house. But he had not
snatched the four coins. He had snatched just one dinar ; his
fear had been lest my husband should give him the half-dinar.
Later we passed a blind beggar, crouched on a bank with a
little girl beside him. To him we gave ten dinars, that is ten-
pence. The little girl shook him and shouted into his ear and
gave him the coin to feel, and then shook him again, furious
that he could not realise the miraculous good fortune that had
befallen him ; but he went on muttering in complaint.

The most heartrending figure we saw was not mendicant.
It was a woman, middle-aged and of dignified physique, who
was sitting on a stone wall, some distance from the road, in an

DALMATIA

»37

attitude of despair. When we passed the place on our return,
half an hour later, she was still sitting there. And there was
here too an outbreak of fantasy, of the human capacity for
laughter and wonder and invention. At a fork in the path near
by we found a knot of men pausing for a gossip, and turning
aside from their talk to laugh at the antics of the lambs they
were leading to market. They dropped an amused eye on the
pale butter-coloured waves in the white lambs’ fleeces, the
nigger-brown waves in the black lambs’ fleeces, on the nearly
closed curves the lambs described when they leaped clear off
the ground and silly fore-paws dangling from a young and
flexible backbone almost met silly hind-paws. These people
have not been anaesthetised by loutishness.

The day we left the island we climbed its highest peak. We
were led by a well-mannered and intelligent man, whose rags
were wretched, though he lived in a huge house and was evi-
dently co-heir to a property of some extent. At the top there
was a glory of clean salt air, and intense but unwounding light ;
for here we are not so far from Greece, where the light is a
benediction, and one can go out at noon till near high summer
without wearing glasses. Below us lion-coloured islands lay in
a dark-blue sea. To the east the mainland raised violet-grey
mountains to a dense superior continent of white clouds ; to the
west the long outer islands lay like the scrolls angels hold up in
holy pictures. We leaned on a gate. It was necessary ; for the
first time I was on a hill where it was impossible to find a place
to sit down without inflicting on oneself innumerable sharp
wounds. As we rested we tried to account for the state of the
island. There is no apparent reason why it should be so poor.
There is plenty of fish in this part of the Adriatic, including very
good mackerel ; there are many parts of the island where oil and
wine and corn can be grown, and sheep and swine can be raised.
It is said that the population is too lazy to work. There was in
the city of Rab a Viennese Jew who managed a photographic
store, and he told us that. " They would rather beg than put
their hands to a plough,” he had said, but his spectacles gleamed
with smug pleasure as he spoke, and he was expressing nothing
but adherence to the disposition of the German subjects of the
Austrian Empire to hate and despise all subjects of other races.
A Serb doctor who was working in Rab told us that the islanders
could not be expected to work on the food they got ; and I

138 BLACK LAMB AND GREY FALCON

remembered that Marmont writes in his memoirs that the lazi-
ness of the Dalmatians was notorious, but entirely disappeared
when he set them down to build roads on regular and adequate
rations.

The reason for the island’s melancholy lies not in its present
but in its past. It is only now, since the war, since Dalmatia
became a part of a Slav state, that it has had a chance to enjoy
the proper benefits of its economic endowment ; and since then
there have been such overwhelming catastrophes in the world
market that no community could live without tragic discomfort
unless it could fall back on accumulations which it had stored
in earlier days. That Rab has never been able to do. Some of
the factors which have hindered her have been real acts of God,
not to be circumvented by man. She has been ravaged by
plague. But for the most part what took the bread out of Rab's
mouth was Empire. The carelessness and cruelty that infects
any power when it governs a people not its own without safe-
guarding itself by giving the subjects the largest possible
amount of autonomy, afflicted this island with hunger and thirst.
Venice made it difficult for Dalmatian fishermen to make their
profit in the only way it could be made before the day of re-
frigeration ; the poor wretches could not salt their fish, because
salt was a state monopoly and was not only extremely expensive
but badly distributed. Moreover Venice restricted the building
of ships in Dalmatia. It was her definite policy to keep the
country poor and dependent. She admitted this very frankly,
on one occasion, by ordering the destruction of all the mulberry
trees which were grown for feeding silk-worms and all the olive
trees. This law she annulled, because the Dalmatians threatened
an insurrection, but not until a great many of the mulberry trees
had been cut down ; and indeed she found herself able to attend
to the matter by indirect methods. Almost all Dalmatian goods,
except corn, which paid an export duty of ten per cent, had to be
sold in Venice at prices fixed by the Venetians ; but any power
that Venice wanted to propitiate, Austria, Ancona, Naples,
Sicily or Malta, could come and sell its goods on the Dalmatian
coast, an unbalanced arrangement which ultimately led to grave
currency difficulties. All these malevolent fiscal interferences
created an unproductive army of douaniers, which in turn
created an unproductive army of smugglers.

This was cause enough that Rab should be poor ; but there

DALMATIA

*39

was a further cause which made her poorer still. It is not at all
inappropriate that the men and women on these Dalmatian
islands should have faces which recall the crucified Christ. The
Venetian Republic did not always fight the Turks with arms.
For a very long time they contented themselves with taking the
edge off the invaders’ attack by the payment of immense bribes
to the officials and military staff of the occupied territories.
The money for these was not supplied by Venice. It was
drawn from the people of Dalmatia. After the fish had rotted,
some remained sound ; after the corn had paid its ten per cent,
and the wool and the wine and the oil had been haggled down
in the Venetian market, some of its price returned to the vendor.
Of this residue the last ducat was extracted to pay the tribute to
the Turks. These people of Dalmatia gave the bread out of
their mouths to save us of Western Europe from Islam ; and it
is ironical that so successfully did they protect us that those
among us who would be broad-minded, who will in pursuit of
that end stretch their minds till they fall apart in idiocy, would
blithely tell us that perhaps the Dalmatians need not have gone
to that trouble, that an Islamised West could not have been
worse than what we are to-day. Their folly is certified for what
it is by the mere sound of the word “ Balkan ” with its sugges-
tion of a disorder that defies human virtue and intelligence to
accomplish its complete correction. I could confirm that certifi-
cate by my own memories : I had only to shut my eyes to smell
the dust, the lethargy, the rage and hopelessness of a Mace-
donian town, once a glory to Europe, that had too long been
Turkish. The West has done much that is ill, it is vulgar and
superficial and economically sadist ; but it has not known that
death in life which was suffered by the Christian provinces under
the Ottoman Empire. From this the people of Rab had saved
me ; I should say, are saving me. The woman who sat on the
stone wall was in want because the gold which should have been
handed down to her had bought my safety from the Turks.
Impotent and embarrassed, I stood on the high mountain and
looked down on the terraced island where my saviours, small
and black as ants, ran here and there, attempting to repair
their destiny.

140

BLACK LAMB AND GREY FALCON

SpUt I

Split, alone of all cities in Dalmatia, has a Neapolitan air.
Except for a few courtyards in its private houses it does not
exhibit the spirit of Venice, which is at once so stately and so
materialist, like a proud ghost that has come back to remind men
that he failed for a million. It recalls Naples, because it also
is a tragic and architecturally magnificent sausage-machine,
where a harried people of mixed race have been forced by
history to run for centuries through the walls and cellars and
sewers of ruined palaces, and have now been evicted by a turn
of events into the open day, neat and slick and uniform, taking
to modern clothes and manners with the adaptability of oil,
though at the same time they are set apart for ever from the
rest of the world by the arcana of language and thoughts they
learned to share while they scurried for generations close
pressed through the darkness.

Split presents its peculiar circumstances to the traveller the
minute he steps ashore. We left the great white liner, the
Alexander, that had brought us through the night from
Rab, and the history of the place was on our right and our left.
On the left was the marine market, where fishing-boats are used
for stalls ; men who must be a mixture of sailor and retailer
bring goods over from the islands, take their boats head-on to
the quay, and lay out their wares in little heaps on the prows.
Pitiful little heaps they often are, of blemished apples, rags of
vegetables, yellowish boards of dried fish, but the men who sell
them are not pitiful. They look tough as their own dried fish,
and stand by with an air of power and pride. This coast feeds
people with other things than food ; it grudges them the means
of life, but lets them live. On our right was a row of shops,
the caf^s and rubbisheries which face any port ; the houses
that rise above them were squeezed between the great Corinthian
columns in the outer gallery of Diocletian’s palace.

For Split is Diocletian’s palace : the palace he built himself
in 305, when, after twenty years of imperial office, he abdicated.
The town has spread beyond the palace walls, but the core of it
still lies within the four gates. Diocletian built it to be within
suburban reach of the Roman town of Salonae, which lies near
by on the gentle slopes between the mountains and the coastal

DALMATIA

*4*

plain. The site had already been occupied by a Greek settlement,
which was called Aspalaton, from a fragrant shrub still specially
abundant here. In the seventh century, the Avars, that tribe
of barbarian marauders who were to provoke a currency crisis
in the Middle Ages because they looted so much gold from
Eastern and Central Europe and hoarded it, came down on
Dalmatia. They swept down on Salonae and destroyed it by
fire and sword. The greater part of the population was killed,
but some had time to fiee out to the islands, which gave them
the barest refuge. What they suffered in those days from cold
and hunger and thirst is still remembered in common legend.
In time they crept back to the mainland, and found nothing left
more habitable than the ruins of Diocletian’s palace. There
they made shelters for themselves against the day when there
should be peace. They are still there. Peace never came.
They were assailed by the Huns, the Hungarians, the Venetians,
the Austrians, and some of them would say that with the over-
coming of those last enemies they still did not win peace ; and
during these centuries of strife the palace and the fugitives have
established a perfect case of symbiosis. It has housed them,
they are now its props. After the war there was a movement to
evacuate Split and restore the palace to its ancient magnificence
by pulling down the houses that had been wedged in between
its walls and columns ; but surveyors very soon found out that
if they went all Diocletian’s work would fall to the ground. The
people that go quickly and darkly about the streets have given
the stone the help it gave them.

“ I would like to go into the palace at once,” said my
husband, " and I greatly wish we could have brought Robert
Adam’s book of engravings with us.” That thought must occur
to many people who go to Split. Adam’s book on Diocletian’s
Palace is one of the most entertaining revelations of the origins
of our day, pretty in itself and an honour to its author. He
came here from Venice in 1757, and made a series of drawings
which aimed at showing what the palace had been like at the
time of its building, in order to obtain some idea of “ the
private edifices of the ancients ”. The enterprise took a great
deal of perseverance and courage, for all idea of the original
plan had been lost centuries before. He had to trace the old
walls through the modern buildings, and was often hindered
by the suspicions of both the inhabitants and the authorities.

M* BLACK LAMB AND GREY FALCON

The Venetian Governor of the town was quite sure he was a
spy and wanted to deport him, but the Commander-in-Chief
of the Venetian garrison, who happened to be a Scotsman, and
one of his Croat officers, were sufficiently cultured to recognise
Adam for what he was, and they got him permission to carry
on his work under the supervision of a soldier.

The indirect results were the best of Georgian architecture,
with its emphasis on space and variety and graceful pomp ;
often when we look at a facade in Portman Square or a doorway
in Portland Place, we are looking at Roman Dalmatia. The
direct result was this book of enchanting drawings — some
of them engraved by Bartolozzi — which, though service-
ably accurate, are beautiful examples of the romantic con-
vention’s opinion that an artist should be allowed as much
latitude in describing a landscape as an angler is allowed in
describing a fish. The peaks of Dalmatia are shown as monstrous
fencers lunging at the black enemy of the sky ; the Roman
cupolas and columns have the supernatural roundness of a
god’s attack of mumps ; vegetation advances on ruins like
infantry ; and peasants in fluent costumes ornament the fore-
ground with fluent gestures, one poor woman, whom I specially
remember, bringing every part of her person into play, including
her bust, in order to sell a fowl to two turbaned Jews, who like
herself are plainly Veronese characters in reduced circumstances.
In the corner of certain drawings are to be seen Adam himself
and his French assistant, Clerisseau, sketching away in their
dashing tricornes and redingotes, very much as one might
imagine the two young men in Cost fan Tutte. It is delightful
to And a book that is a pretty book in the lightest sense, that
pleases like a flower or a sweetmeat, and that is also the founda-
tion for a grave and noble art which has sheltered and nourished
us all our days.

“ Yes,” I said to my husband, “ it is disgusting that one
cannot remember pictures and drawings exactly. It would
have been wonderful to have the book by us, and see exactly
how the palace struck a man of two centuries ago, and how it
strikes us, who owe our eye for architecture largely to that
man.” " Then why did we not bring the book ? ” asked my
husband. “ Well, it weighs just over a stone,” I said. “ I
weighed it once on the bathroom scales.” " Why did you do
that ? ” asked my husband. " Because it occurred to me one

DALMATIA

143

day that I knew the weight of nothing except myself and joints
of meat,” 1 said, " and I just picked that up to give me an idea
of something else.” " Well, well ! ” said my husband, " it
makes me distrust Fabre and all other writers on insect life
when I realise how mysterious your proceedings would often
seem to a superior being watching them through a microscope.
But tell me, why didn’t we bring it, even if it does weigh a little
over a stone ? We have a little money to spare for its transport.
It would have given us pleasure. Why didn’t we do it ? ”
" Well, it would have been no use,” I said ; “ we couldn’t
have carried anything so heavy as that about the streets.”
“ Yes, we could,” said my husband ; “ we could have hired a
wheelbarrow and pushed it about from point to point.” “ But
people would have thought we were mad ! ” I exclaimed. “ Well,
would they ? ” countered my husband. “ That’s just what I’m
wondering. In fact, it’s what made me pursue the subject.
These Slavs think all sorts of things natural that we think odd ;
nothing seems to worry them so long as it satisfies a real desire.
I was wondering if they could take a thing like this in their
stride ; because after all we feel a real desire to look at Adam’s
book here.” ” I don’t know,” I said, “ but there is Philip
Thomson standing in the doorway of our hotel, and we can ask
him.”

Philip Thomson teaches English to such inhabitants of
Split as wish to learn it. He is a fine-boned, fastidious, observant
being, very detached except in his preference for Dalmatia over
all other parts of the world, and for Split over all other parts
of Dalmatia. We had morning coffee with him, good un-
necessary elevenses, in the square outside our hotel, a red
stucco copy of a Venetian piazza, with palm trees in it, which
is quite a happy effort, and we put the question to him. ” Oh,
but they’d think it very odd here, if you went about the streets
trundling a book in a wheel-barrow and stopping to look at the
pictures in it, very odd indeed,” said Philip. " You evidently
don’t understand that here in Split we are very much on parade.
We’re not a bit like the Serbs, who don’t care what they do,
who laugh and cry when they feel like it, and turn cartwheels
in the street if they want exercise. That’s one of the reasons
we don’t like the Serbs. To us it seems self-evident that a proud
man must guard himself from criticism every moment of the day.
That’s what accounts for the most salient characteristic of the

144 BLACK LAMB AND GREY FALCON

Splitchani, which is a self-flaying satirical humour ; better laugh
at yourself before anybody else has time to do it. But formality is
another result. I suppose it comes of being watched all the time
by people who thought they were better than you, the Dalma-
tians, the Hungarians and the Venetians and the Austrians.”

“ But all this,” Philip continued, “ brings to light one very
strange thing about Split. Did you notice how I answered
you off-hand, as if Split had a perfectly definite character, and
I could speak for the whole of its inhabitants ? Well, so I
could. Yet that’s funny, for the old town of Split was a tiny
place, really not much more than the palace and a small over-
flow round its walls, and all this town you see stretching over
the surrounding hills and along the coast is new. A very large
percentage of the population came here after the war, some to
work, some as refugees from the Slav territories which have
been given to Italy. Do you see that pretty dark woman who
is just crossing the square ? She is one of my star pupils and
she belongs to a family that left Zara as soon as it was handed
over to the Italians, like all the best families of the town. Now
Zara has quite a different history, and, from all I hear, quite a
different atmosphere. But this woman and her family, and all
the others who migrated with her, have been completely absorbed
by Split. They are indistinguishable from all the natives, and
I have seen them in the process of conversion. It’s happened
gradually but surely. It’s a curious victory for a system of
manners that, so far as I can see, has nothing to do with eco-
nomics. For people here are not rich, yet there is considerable
elegance.”

This is, indeed, not a rich city. Later we lunched with
Philip in a restaurant which though small was not a mere
bistrot, which was patronised by handsome and dignified people
who were either professional or commercial men. For the sweet
course we were given two apiece of palatschinken, those pan-
cakes stuffed with jam which one eats all over Central Europe.
The Balkans inherited the recipe from the Byzantines, who ate
them under the name of palacountas. We could eat no more
than one, for the meal, as almost always in these parts, had been
good and abundant. " Shall I put the palatschinken in paper
for the Herrschaft to take home with them ? ” asked the waiter.
We thought not. But the waiter doubted our sincerity. “ Is
it because they are strangers,” he asked Philip, “ and do not

DALMATIA

>45

know that we are always delighted to do this sort of things for
our clients ? Down in the new hotels, I fully understand, they
would be disagreeable about it, such institutions being, as we
know, founded on extravagance and ostentation. But here we
are not like that, we know that what God gave us for food was
not meant to be wasted, so the Herrschaft need not be shy.”
" I do not think that they are refusing your kind offer because
they are shy,” said Philip resourcefully, “ you see they are stay-
ing at one of the big hotels, and they will have to dine there
anyway, so really the palatschinken would be of very little use
to them.”

The waiter accepted this, and went away ; but soon came
back. “ But if the Herrschaft took them away with them,” he
insisted, " then they would not order a whole dinner. They
could just take the soup and a meat dish, and afterwards they
could go upstairs and have these instead of dessert. ” " Thank you
very much for your kind thought,” said Philip, still not at a loss.
" I think, however, that my friends are en pension.” " But it
would be nice,” said the waiter, “ if the lady felt hungry in the
night, for her to be able to put out her hand and find a piece of
cold palatschinken by her bed.” I shall never think he was
right ; but his kindly courtesy was something to be remembered,
and his sense, not hysterical but quietly passionate, of economy
as a prime necessity. In Diocletian’s Palace, throughout the
ages, a great many very well-mannered people must have
learned to draw in their belts very tight upon occasion ; and
certainly they would be encouraged to be mannerly by their
surroundings which, even to-day, speak of magnificent decorum.

It is not, of course, remarkable as an example of Roman
architecture. It cannot hold a candle to the Baths of Caracalla,
or the Forum, or the Palatine. But it makes an extraordinary
revelation of the continuity of history. One passes through the
gate that is squeezed between the rubbisheries on the quayside
straight into antiquity. One stands in the colonnaded courtyard
of a fourth-century Roman palace ; in front is the entrance to
the imperial apartments, to the left is the temple which was
Diocletian’s mausoleum, now the Cathedral, and to the right is
the Temple of Aesculapius, just as a schoolboy learning Latin
and as old ladies who used to go to the Royal Academy in the
days of Alma-Tadema would imagine it. Only the vistas have
been filled in with people. Rather less than one-fifth of the

146 BLACK LAMB AND GREY FALCON

population of Split, which numbers forty-four thousand, lives in
the nine acres of the palace precincts ; but the remaining four-
fifths stream through it all day long, because the passages which
pierce it from north to south and from east to west are the most
convenient ways to the new parts of the town from the harbour.
The fifth that lives within the palace packs the sides of these
crowded thoroughfares with houses set as closely as cells in a
honeycomb, filling every vacant space that was left by Dio-
cletian’s architects. One cannot, for example, see the Temple
of Aesculapius as one stands in the fine open courtyard as it
' was intended one should do ; the interstices on that side of the
peristyle have been blocked by Venetian Gothic buildings,
which project balconies on a line with the entablatures of neigh-
bouring coliunns and open doorways just beside their bases.

Yet there is no sense of disorder or vandalism. It would be
as frivolous to object to the adaptations the children of the
palace have made to live as it would be to regret that a woman
who had reared a large and glorious family had lost her girlish
appearance. That is because these adaptations have always
been made respectfully. So far as the walls stood they have
been allowed to stand ; there has been no destruction for the
sake of pilfering material for new buildings. It is, therefore,
as real an architectural entity, as evident to the eye of the be-
holder, as the Temple or Gray’s Inn. There is only one blot
on it, and that is not the work of necessity. In the middle of
the peristyle of the imperial apartments, this superb but small
open space, there has been placed a statue by Mestrovitch of a
fourth-century Bishop who won the Slavs the right to use the
liturgy in their own tongue. Nobody can say whether it is a
good statue or not. The only fact that is observable about it
in this position is that it is twenty-four feet high. A more un-
godly misfit was never seen. It reduces the architectural pro-
portions of the palace to chaos, for its head is on a level with
the colonnades, and the passage in which it stands is only forty
feet wide. This is hard on it, for on a low wall near by there
lies a black granite sphinx from Egypt, part of the original
decorations of the palace, but far older, seventeen hundred years
older, of the great age of Egyptian seulpture ; and though this
is not five feet long its compact perfection makes the statue of
the Bishop gangling and flimsy, lacking in true mass, like one
of those marionettes one may sometimes see through the open

DALMATIA

>47

door of a warehouse in Nice, kept against next year’s Carnival.

It cannot be conceived by the traveller why Mestrovitch
wanted this statue to be put here, or why the authorities
humoured him. If the step was inspired by nationalist senti-
ment, if it is supposed to represent the triumph of the Slav
over Roman domination, nobody present can have known
much history. For Diocletian’s Palace commemorates a time
when the Illyrians, the native stock of Dalmatia, whose blood
assuredly runs in the veins of most modern Dalmatians, had
effective control of the Roman Empire ; it commemorates one
of the prettiest of time's revenges. Rome destroyed, for perhaps
no better reason than that she was an empire and could do it,
the ancient civilisation of Illyria. But when she later needed
soimd governors to defend her from barbarian invaders, Illyria
gave her thirteen rulers and defenders, of whom only one was
a failure. All the others deserved the title they were given,
restitutores orbis ; even though it turned out that the earth as
they knew it was not restorable. Of these the two greatest were
Diocletian and Constantine ; and some would say that Dio-
cletian was the greater of the two.

His mausoleum is exquisitely appropriate to him. It is a
domed building, octagonal outside and circular within. It is
naughtily designed. Its interior is surrounded by a double
row of columns, one on top of the other, which have no
functional purpose at all ; they do nothing except support
their own over-elaborate entablatures and capitals, and eat up
much valuable space in doing so. Diocletian came to Rome
when the rose of the world was overblown, and style forgotten.
It must originally have been pitchy dark, for all the windows
were made when it was centuries old. Because of this blackness
and something flat-footed and Oriental in the design, some
have thought that Diocletian did not build it as a temple nor
as a mausoleum. They have suspected that he, who was first
and foremost a soldier and turned by preference to the East,
was a follower of the bloody and unspiritual but dramatic
religion of Mithraism, the Persian cult which had been adopted
by the legionaries, and that here he tried to make a mock
cavern, an imitation of the grottoes in which his fellow-soldiers
worshipped the god that came out of the sun. But not
only is the building otiose and dank, it is oddly executed.
It is full of incongruities, such as a lack of accord between

mS black lamb and grey falcon

capitals and entablatures, which were committed because the
architects were using the remains of older buildings as their
material, and had to join the pieces as best they could. Diocletian
had done much the same for the Roman Empire. He took
the remains of a social and political structure and built them
into a new and impressive-looking edifice.

In this palace of old oddments put together to look like new,
this imperial expert in makeshifts must have had some better
moments. His edicts show that he was far too intelligent not
to realise that he had not made a very good job of his cobbling.
He was a great man wholly worsted by his age. He probably
wanted real power, the power to direct one’s environment
towards a harmonious end, and not fictitious power, the power
to order and be obeyed ; and he must have known that he had
not been able to exercise real power over Rome. It would
have been easier for him if what we were told when we were
young was true, and that the decay of Rome was due to im-
morality. Life, however, is never as simple as that, and human
beings rarely so potent. There is so little difference between the
extent to which any large number of people indulge in sexual
intercourse, when they indulge in it without inhibitions and
when they indulge in it with inhibitions, that it cannot often
be a determining factor in history. The exceptional person
may be an ascetic or a debauchee, but the average man finds
celibacy and sexual excess equally difficult. All we know of
Roman immorality teaches us that absolute power is a poison,
and that the Romans, being fundamentally an inartistic people,
had a taste for pornography which they often gratified in the
description of individuals and families on which that poison
had worked.

Had general immorality been the cause of the decay of the
empire, Diocletian could have settled it ; he was a good bullying
soldier. But the trouble was pervasive and deep-rooted as
couch-grass. Rome had been a peasant state, it had passed on
to feudal capitalism, the landowners and the great industrialists
became tyrants ; against this tyranny the bourgeoisie and the
proletariat revolted. Then the bourgeoisie became the tyrants.
They could bribe the town proletariat with their leavings, but the
peasants became their enemies. The army was peasant, for
country stock is healthier. Therefore, in the third century,
there was bitter strife between the army and the bourgeoisie.

DALMATIA 149

Then came the Illyrian emperors, restitutores orbis. Order, it
was said, was restored.

But this, the greatest of the Illyrian emperors, must have
known that this was not true : that, on the contrary, disorder
had been stabilised. His edicts had commanded in the per-
emptory tone of the parade-g^und that every man in the
empire should stay by his post and do his duty, fulfilling this
and that public obligation and drawing this and that private
reward. There was genius in his plan. But it was a juggler’s
feat of balancing, no more. It corrected none of the fundamental
evils of Roman society. This could hardly be expected, for
Diocletian had been born too late to profit by the discussion of
first principles which Roman culture had practised in its securer
days ; he had spent his whole life in struggles against violence
which led him to a preoccupation with compulsion. He main-
tained the empire in a state of apparent equilibrium for twenty-
one years. But the rot went on. The roads fell into ruin. The
land was vexed with brigands and the sea with pirates. Agri-
culture was harried out of existence by demands for taxation
in kind and forced labour, and good soil became desert. Prices
rose and currency fell ; and to keep up the still enormously
costly machinery of the central administration the remnants of
the moneyed class were skinned by the tax-collector. The
invasion of the barbarians was an immediate danger, but only
because the empire was so internally weakened by its economic
problems. Of these nobody knew the solution at the beginning
of the fourth century, and indeed they have not been solved
now, in the middle of the twentieth century.

For some strange reason many have written of Diocletian’s
resignation of imperial power and retirement to his native
Illyria as if it were an unnatural step which required a special
explanation. Some of the pious have thought that he was
consumed by remorse for his persecution of the Christians, but
nothing could be less likely. Immediately after his election as
Emperor he had chosen to share his power with an equal and
two slightly inferior colleagues, in a system which was known
as the Tetrarchy ; and it was one of his colleagues, Galerius,
who was responsible for what are falsely known as the persecu-
tions of Diocletian. But nothing could be more comprehensible
than that he should, just then, have wanted rest and his own
country. He was fifty-nine, and had been exceedingly ill for a

VOL. I L

150 BLACK LAMB AND GREY FALCON

year ; and he had twenty-one years of office behind him. He
had had a hard life. He had come from a peasant home to
enlist in one of the two Dalmatian legions, and since then he
had borne an increasing burden of military and legislative
responsibility. Violence must have disgusted such an intelligent
man, but he had had to avail himself of it very often. In order
to be chosen Caesar by the military council he had had to whip
out his sword and drive it into the breast of a fellow-officer
who might have been a rival. So often, indeed, had he had to
avail himself of violence that he must have feared he would
himself become its victim at the end. A society which is ruled
by the sword can never be stable, if only because the sword is
always passing from hand to hand, from the ageing to the
young.

In the halls of his palace, which must have been extremely
cold and sunless, as they were lit only by holes in the roof, he
cannot have found the peace he sought. The disorder of the
world increased. The members of the Tetrarchy wrangled ;
some died and were replaced by others not less contentious.
They split the empire between their greeds, and suddenly,
improbably, they dipped their fingers into Diocletian’s blood.
He had a wife called Prisca and a daughter called Valeria, who
were very dear to him. Both had become Christians. We
know of no protest against this on the part of Diocletian.
Valeria’s hand he had disposed of in circumstances that bring
home the psychological differences between antiquity and the
modern world. When he had been chosen as Emperor he had
elected to share his power first with Maximian alone, then with
two other generals, Galerius and Constantius Chlorus. When
these two last were admitted to the sovereign authority, Dio-
cletian adopted Galerius and Maximian adopted Constantius
Chlorus, and each adopted father gave his daughter to his
adopted son, though this meant that each had to repudiate his
existing wife.

The marriage of Valeria must have been sufficiently horrible ;
for Galerius was a brute whose violence precipitated him from
disaster to disaster, and he was bitterly anti-Christian. But
she found solace in caring for his illegitimate son, Candidianus,
and at last Galerius died, issuing on his deathbed an edict
which put an end to the persecution of the Christians. She
might have then enjoyed some happiness had she not been left

DALMATIA

>5«

a very rich woman. This made Galerius’ successor, Maximin
Daia, want to marry her, although he had a wife. When she
refused he brought fraudulent legal proceedings against her.
All her goods were confiscated, her household was broken up,
some of her women friends were killed, and she and the boy
Candidianus were sent into exile in the deserts of Syria. It is
only in some special and esoteric sense that women are the pro-
tected sex.

From these dark halls Diocletian appealed for mercy to the
man whom his own invention of the Tetrarchy had raised
to power. He entreated Maximin Daia to allow Valeria
to come back to Aspalaton. He was refused. But later it
seemed that Valeria was safe, for Maximin Daia died, and
she and Candidianus were able to take refuge with another
of the four Caesars, Licinius, who first received them with a
kindliness that was natural enough, since he owed his ad-
vancement to the dead Galerius. It looked as if they would
find permanent safety with him. But suddenly he turned
against them and murdered the boy, for no other reason
than that he was a cruel and stupid man and bloodshed
was fashionable just then. Valeria managed to escape in
the dress of a plebeian and disappeared. To Diocletian,
fond father though he was, this may have brought no special
shattering shock. It may have seemed but one shadow in the
progress of a night that was engulfing all. For Diocletian was
receiving letters that were pressing him to visit Licinius and his
ally, the Caesar Constantine. He excused himself, pleading
illness and old age. The invitations became ominously insistent.
He was in danger of being involved in a dispute among the
Tetrarchs. Sooner or later one side or other would have his
blood. He died, it is thought by self-administered poison, some
time between 313 and 316. The earlier date is to be hoped for ;
in that case he would not have heard that in 314 his daughter
was found in hiding at Salonica and there beheaded and thrown
into the sea.

What did Diocletian feel when all this was happening to him ?
Agony, of course. It is an emotion that human beings feel far
more often than is admitted ; and it is not their fault. History
imposes it on us. There is no use denying the horrible nature
of our human destiny. Diocletian must have felt one kind of
agony because he was a healthy peasant, and his bowels must

I5S BLACK LAMB AND GREY FALCON

have slid backwards and forwards like a snake when he doubted
the safety of his daughter ; another because though he had
been bom a peasant he had been bom a peasant into a civilised
world, and faculties developed in civilisation are revolted when
they have to apprehend experiences provided by barbarism ;
and another because it is always terrible to advance from
particular success to particular success and be faced at last
with general defeat, and he had passed from achievement to
achievement only to see the negation of all his achievements
decreed by impersonal forces which, if he had been truly imperial
and the right object of worship by the common man, he should
have anticipated and forestalled. How did he endure all these
agonies i* If he went for comfort into the building which was
afterwards his mausoleum, and if it was, as some think, the
temple of Jupiter, he can have found little enough. Paganism,
when it was not rural and naively animist, or urban and a brake
applied to the high spirits of success, must have been an empty
form, claiming at its most ambitious to provide just that
stoicism which an exceptional man might find for himself and
recognise as inadequate. If the building was a Mithraic grotto,
then he must have looked at the governing sculpture of the god
slitting the throat of the bull and he must have said to himself,
" Yes, the world is exactly like that. I know it. Blood flows,
and life goes on. But what of it ? Is the process not disgust-
ing ? ” And Mithras would give no answer.

It is possible that Diocletian found his comfort in the
secular side of his palace, in its splendour. Some have thought
that he built it for the same reason that he had built his baths
in Rome, to give work to the vast number of proletarians that
were hungry and idle. But these grandiose public works would
not have come into Diocletian’s mind had he not been in love
with magnificence, and indeed he had demonstrated such an
infatuation while he was Emperor by his elaboration of court
ceremonial. It had grown more and more spectacular during
the last century or so, and he gave its gorgeousness a fixed and
extreme character. There was more and more difficulty in
gaining access to the sacred person of the Emperor, and those
who were given this privilege had to bow before him in an act
of adoration as due to the holy of holies. The Emperor, who
was by then a focus of unresolvable perplexities, stood providing
a strongly contrary appearance in vestments stiff with richness

DALMATIA 153

and insignia glittering with the known world’s finest preciops
stones and goldsmith’s work ; and his visitor, even if the same
blood ran in his veins, had to kneel down and touch a comer
of the robe with his lips.

Diocletian, who had prescribed this ritual, must certainly
have derived some consolation from the grandeur of Aspalaton,
the great arcaded wall it turned to the Adriatic, its four separate
wards, each town size, and its seventeen watch-towers, its
plenitude of marble, its colonnades that wait for proud pro-
cessions, its passages that drive portentously through darkness
to the withdrawn abode of greatness. Robes stiff with em-
broidery help the encased body to ignore its flimsiness ; a
diadem makes the head forget that it has not yet evolved the
needed plan of action. In a palace that lifts the hard core out
of the mountains to make a countryside impregnable by wind
and rain, it would seem untrue that we can build ourselves no
refuge against certain large movements of destiny. But there
was a consideration which may have disturbed Diocletian as he
tried to sustain himself on Aspalaton. It was not Rome,
which he had visited only once, that had given him his
conception of magnificence as an aid to the invincibility of
government. He had drawn it from Persia, where he had been
immensely impressed by the vast palaces and their subtle and
evocative ceremonial. But he had visited Persia as an invader,
to destroy the Sassanian kings. The symbol that he depended
upon he had himself proved invalid.

After his death he remained corporeally in possession of
the palace, his tomb resting in the centre of the mausoleum.
Thirty years or so later, a woman was put to death for stealing
the purple pall from his sarcophagus, a strange, crazy crime,
desperate and imaginative, a criticism in which he would by
now have concurred, for the walls of the empire which he had
failed to repair had fallen and let a sea of catastrophe wash
over his people. The Adriatic was ravaged by Vandal pirates,
and Rome had been sacked by the barbarians three times in
sixty years ; the Huns had devastated the Danube, and Salonae
was crowded with refugees. But this was for the meantime a
little ledge of safety, and ordinary life went on and seemed to
prove that there was some sense in the idea of building a palace
for shelter. Illyria had always been noted for its textiles. There
is a statue of the Emperor Augustus in the Capitoline Museum

154 BLACK LAMB AND GREY FALCON

at Rome, which has on its shield the figure of an Illyrian ; he
is wearing a knee-length tunic, beltless but with sleeves, and
ornamented by bands running from the shoulders to the lower
hem. This is our first knowledge of the Dalmatic. In the third
century the Pope ordered that all martyrs should be buried
in it, and it is still worn by all deacons and officiating Bishops
in the Western church, and by English kings at their coronation.
No matter what bestial tricks history might be playing, there
were always looms at work in Illyria. A considerable corner of
Aspalaton was taken up by a large factory, operated by female
labour, which turned out uniforms for the Roman Army as
well as civilian material.

But other events proved that a palace is no shelter at all.
In the middle of the fifth century there arose a Dalmatian of
genius, Marcellinus, who served the army loyally on condition
that he was allowed to rule Dalmatia as an independent
kingdom owing allegiance to the Emperor. It is possible that
the empire might have survived as a federation of such states,
modest in extent and governed by men of local ambitions on the
old Roman principles of efficiency and public spirit. Marcellinus
took up his residence in Diocletian’s Palace, and with his
courage and wisdom and energy in the defence of his people
filled it again with recognisable majesty. But after thirteen
years of benign brilliance he went in the service of the Emperor
to Sicily, for the purpose of leading an expedition against the
Vandals in Africa ; and there he was murdered by order of
Ricimer, a German general who was one of the barbarians who
were destroying Rome from within. They had no use for local
potentates who would build up the empire by raising their
territories to military and economic strength ; they wanted it as
a defenceless field of exploitation for an international army.
The last of the restitutores orbU had not found safety where he
might accomplish his work.

A few years later his nephew, who was called by that name,
Julius Nepos, Julius the Nephew, and had ruled Dalmatia in
his uncle’s place, was called to be Emperor of the West. It was
not an encouraging invitation. " Cocky, cocky, come and be
killed.” But since it was issued by the Emperor of the East he
did not dare to refuse. He had at once to oust a competitor,
whom he consoled for his defeat by making him Bishop of
Salonae ; chroniclers with a sense of the picturesque describe

DALMATIA

>SS

him tearing off his rival's imperial insignia and delivering him
over to a barber who cut his tonsure and a priest who gave him
the episcopal consecration. It was a practical step, since it pre-
vented his rival avenging himself. Julius the Nephew had no
chance to show his quality, for he was faced by an infinity of
hostile barbarians, within and without the empire, and he made
a fatal error by summoning his Dalmatian Commander-in-
chief, Orestes, to govern Gaul. This Orestes was an Illyrian
adventurer who had at one time been secretary to Attila the
Hun. It can never have been a satisfactory reference. But
he had established himself in the Roman order by marrying a
patrician’s daughter, and he was able to turn on his master and
declare his own son Romulus Emperor.

Julius the Nephew went back to Aspalaton and there lived
for five years. Meanwhile Orestes was murdered by a barbarian
general, Odoacer, who formed a curious plan of supporting the
cause of Romulus, whose youth and beauty he much admired,
and acting as the power behind the throne. In 480 two Dal-
matian counts, Victor and Ovida, one a Romanised Illyrian
and the other a barbarian, made their way into Diocletian’s
Palace and treacherously killed Julius. He was the last legiti-
mately elected Emperor of the West. His assassins had been
moved by the hope of pleasing Odoacer ; the barbarian Ovida
wished to make himself King of Dalmatia, and he needed
imperial support. But Odoacer was as hostile to regional rulers
as the other murderer Ricimer, and at the end of a punitive war
on Dalmatia he killed Ovida with his own hand. Later he him-
self was killed by Theodoric, King of the Ostrogoths, who after
signing a treaty with him invited him to a banquet and then ran
him through with a sword, and massacred all his men. Murder.
Murder. Murder. Murder.

It was about this time that the sarcophagus of Diocletian
disappeared. For about a hundred and seventy years it was
visible, firmly planted in the middle of the mausoleum, described
by intelligent visitors. Then it suddenly is not there any more.
It is suggested that a party of revengeful Christians threw it into
the sea ; but that is an action comprehensible only in a smoulder-
ing minority, and Christianity had been the official religion of
the Roman Empire since the time of the Emperor’s death. Nor
can it be supposed that the sarcophagus was destroyed by the
Avar invaders, for they did not reach the coast until a couple

IS6 BLACK LAMB AND GREY FALCON

of centuries later. Probably the occasion of its disappearance
was far less dramatic. The everyday routine of life persisted in
Aspalaton, however many barbarians committed murder ; in
the textile factory the shuttles crossed and recrossed the loom.
Without doubt it continued to be necessary that Diocletian’s
mausoleum should be cleaned and repaired, and it may well
have happened that one day the owner of a yard near by said,
“Yes, you can put it down there ”, watching reverently, and
wondering that he should be the guardian of such a holy thing.
It may be also that the workmen who laid it down did not come
back, that there was a threat to the city from land or sea which
called them and the authorities who employed them and the
owner of the yard himself to the defence. Soon it might be that
people would say of the sarcophagus, “ I wonder when they
will come and take it back ’’ ; but continued unrest may have
made it advisable that the treasures of the temples should be
kept dispersed. Later it might be that a break in a chain
of family confidences, due to violent death or flight or
even sudden natural death, would leave the sarcophagus un-
identified and only vaguely important. Some day a woman
would say of it, “ I really do not know what that is. It is just
something that has always been here ; and it is full of old
things.” She spoke the truth. It was full of old things : the
bones of Diocletian the man, the robes of Diocletian the Em-
peror, the idea of a world order imposed on the peoples by
superior people, who were assumed to know because they could
act. Aspalaton, the palace of the great Restorer of the Earth,
had passed away. It had become Split, a city lived in by
common people, who could establish order within the limits of
a kitchen or a workshop or a textile factory, but had been
monstrously hindered in the exercise of that capacity by the
efforts of the superior people who establish world order.

I have no doubt that one day Diocletian’s sarcophagus will
turn up in the cellars of some old and absent-minded family of
Split ; and in the cellars of the Dalmatian mind, the foundation
on which its present philosophy is built, the old Emperor is to
be found also. We in England have an unhistoric attitude to
our lives, because every generation has felt excitement over a
clear-cut historical novelty, which has given it enough to tell its
children and grandchildren without drawing on its father’s and
grandfather’s tales. In all these impressive events the central

DALMATIA 157

government has played a part which was, at any rate, not
tragically disgraceful, at least so far as our own country is
concerned, and was often very creditable. We think of the
national organisation that controls the public services through-
out the country as ambitious on the whole to give the common
man every opportunity to exercise his ability for keeping order
in his own sphere.

It would not be so, however, if the last clear-cut event in
English history had been the departure of the Roman legionaries
in 420 ; and if there had followed a period of internal disorder
which the battle of Hastings had perpetuated to our own day,
by inaugurating a series of attempts at invasion and settlement
by imperialistic Continental powers. Then the idea of the state
would seem to us like wine, a delight that must be enjoyed
only in moderation lest it lead to drunkenness and violence,
uproar and want. We would know that some degree of national
organisation is necessary, and that dominance is the most
exquisite of luxuries, but we would think of kings and states-
men as mischief-makers whose failure drove us from time to
time out of our houses into ditches, to feed on roots and berries.
The difference in our attitude can be computed if we try to
imagine what our reaction to the word “ queen " would be if
we had had no Victoria or Elizabeth, or even Anne, and that
Boadicea had had a determining effect on English history.

So it is with the Splitchani, and indeed with all Dalmatians.
They are aware of Diocletian’s failure to restore the earth, and
what it cost them. Therefore their instinct is to brace them-
selves against any central authority as if it were their enemy.
The angry young men run about shouting. But they have
Illyrian blood as well as Slav ; they are of the same race that
produced Diocletian and the other restitutores orbis. They are
profoundly sensitive to the temptation of power. Therefore
they cannot break their preoccupation with the central authority.
The young men cannot sit down and get angry about something
else. The stranger will be vastly mistaken if he regards this
attitude as petulant barbarism. It is an extremely sensible
reaction to his experience, and it has helped him to protect his
rights under the rule of empires which were indifferent or hostile
to him. It might yet be of enormous service to humanity if the
world were threatened by an evil domination.

BLACK LAMB AND GREY FALCON

158

Split II

Diocletian’s mausoleum was transformed into a cathedral
during the eighth century. It is still obviously a pagan edifice,
though the Christians fitted it in the thirteenth century with a
good bell-tower, and with fine carved doors that show twenty-
eight scenes from the life of Christ, and have gone on filling it
with pious objects till it has something of a box-room air. There
is a superb pulpit of the same date as the tower and the doors,
splendid with winged beasts, and two good fifteenth-century
tombs, one showing a Flagellation of Christ, the work of
George the Dalmatian, who is alluded to as Georgio Orsini by
those who want to show this coast as a Slav wilderness redeemed
by Venetian culture, with no other justification than that a son
or nephew of his called himself by that name. One can look at
nothing in Dalmatia, not even a Flagellation of Christ, without
being driven back to the struggle of Slav nationalism. The
history of the Cathedral is dominated by it ; here was the centre
of the movement, which has been for the most part successful,
for the use of the Slav liturgy.

There were, however, two ecclesiastics of Split, who were
of importance to the rest of the world. There was the Arch-
deacon Thomas of Spalato, in the thirteenth century, who wrote
an excellent history of his own times and was the only con-
temporary foreigner known to have seen St. Francis of Assisi,
and heard him preach ; and there was the seventeenth-century
Archbishop Mark Antony de Dominis, who was typically Slav
in being at once an intellectual and incredibly naive. He came
from the city of Rab, from one of its exquisite Gothic palaces.
Though he was an Archbishop, and added to the mausoleum its
present choir, his main interest lay in scientific studies ; and he
hit on the discovery of the solar spectrum one day while he was
saying mass, more than half a century before Newton. Much
of Descartes’ work is founded on his, and Goethe writes of him
in his book on the theory of colour. Unfortunately he became
interested in matters of religion, which was a fatal mistake for a
Renaissance prelate of his kind. Soon he became convinced
of the truth of Protestantism, and through the influence of his
friend. Sir Henry Wotton, the author of “ You meaner beauties
of the night ”, who was then the English Ambassador to Venice,

DALMATIA

(59

he was appointed Dean of Windsor and Master of the Savoy
and vicar of West Ilsley, up on the Berkshire downs. He then
published a tremendous attack on the Roman Catholic Church
under the title of De reptiblica ecclesiasHca. But doubts vexed
him, and he came to the conclusion that he was wrong. In
touching abandonment to the Slav belief that people are not
really unreasonable, he went to Rome to talk about it to the
Pope. That Pope died, and was succeeded by one less tolerant.
Dominis was thrown into the Castle of Saint Angelo and died
in its dungeons. Later the Inquisition tried him for heresy and
found him guilty, so dug up his corpse and burned it together
with his writings.

But though the religious life of Split is obscured by its
nationalism in the historical annals, we must remember that much
of human activity goes unrecorded. There is great piety among
the Splitchani. We noted it that night when the Professor
came to dine with us. The Professor is a great Latinist, and
was the pupil, assistant and close friend of Bulitch, the famous
scholar who spent his life working on the antiquities of Split
and Salonae. He is in his late sixties, but has the charm of
extreme youth, for he comes to a pleasure and hails it happily
for what it is without any bitterness accumulated from past
disappointments, and he believes that any moment the whole
process of life may make a slight switch-over and that every-
thing will be agreeable for ever. His manners would satisfy
the standards of any capital in the world, but at the same time
he is exquisitely, pungently local. " Thank you, I will have no
lobster," he said to us. " I am sure it is excellent, but, like
many of my kind, who have had to renounce robust health along
with the life of action, I have a weak digestion.” He then
emptied his pepper-pot into his soup till its surface became
completely black. “ See,” he said, " how carefully I eat. I
never neglect to take plenty of pepper, since it is excellent for
the health. What, did you not know that ? But I assure you,
one can hardly live long unless one eats a great deal of pepper.”
I was enchanted ; the Abb^ Fortis, who made a tour of the
coast in the eighteenth century, expressed . amazement at the
enormous quantities of pepper eaten by the Dalmatians, and their
faith in it as a medicament.

Being so much a child of his country, he had of course to
speak of nationalism, and indeed what he said brought home

i6o BLACK LAMB AND GREY FALCON

to me more than anything else the extreme unsuitability, the
irksomeness of the last subjection which the Dalmatians had
had to yield to an external authority. Here was a man who was
the exact Adriatic equivalent of an Oxford don ; he would by
nature have found all his satisfaction in the pursuit of learning.
But from his youth and through all his adult years he had been
an active member of a party that existed to organise revolt
against the Austrian Government ; and there was none of his
large and respectable family who had not been as deeply engaged
in rebellion as himself. “ One of my brothers,” he told us, " was
very well known as a Dalmatian patriot, for he had trouble that
was reported in the newspapers all over Europe. For he was a
priest, and the Austrians expelled him from Dalmatia though
he had a parish. Still he did not suffer very much from that,
for the great Bishop Strossmayer took him under his protection
and gave him a parish near Zagreb.

” How fortunate for me all that trouble was I ” he exclaimed,
beaming. " For when I was going to the University at Vienna
to make my studies Bishop Strossmayer invited me to see him.
And that is the most wonderful thing that happened to me in
my whole life. It was a very long time ago, for I was then only
nineteen years old, but I have forgotten nothing of it. The room
seemed bright as an altar at Easter when I went in, but that
was not so much because of the chandeliers, which were indeed
superb, but because of the company. There was Bishop Stross-
mayer himself, who was amazing in his handsomeness and
elegance, and also there were at least twenty other people, who
were all notable, great aristocrats of our race, or scholars, or
artists, or foreigners of eminence, or women of superb beauty
and great distinction. It is well known that Bishop Strossmayer
was deeply respectful to the beauty of women, as to all the
beauties of creation.

" But do not think that this was a mere worldly dinner-
party. The great man imposed on it his own superiority. First
we stood at the table, and he himself said grace in his exquisite
Latin, which was Latin as no one else has spoken it, as the
angels may speak it. Then we sat down, and as we ate a young
priest read us a passage from the Gospel of St. John, and then a
fable from Aesop. Then the Bishop started the conversation,
which, though the party was so large, was nevertheless general
and brilliant beyond imagination. It was his own doing, of

DALMATIA i6i

course, yet it did not seem so. It all appeared to happen quite
naturally. It was as if the birds in a wood should start singing
and their notes should combine to form utterances of a wisdom
unsurpassed by the philosophers. Alas I It is terrible that
such a perfect thing should have been, and should be no longer.
I suppose all the people who were there are dead, except some
of the women ; for I was much the youngest man there. But
that feeling over what is gone the ancients knew well, and
expressed better than we can.” He murmured scraps of Latin
verse. It was very characteristically Slav that he said nothing
of having been troubled by social embarrassment at this dinner-
party. In any other country, a boy of twenty, not rich, from a
provincial town, would have felt timid at a dinner-party given
in a capital by one of the most famous men of the time. But
Serbs and Croats alike are an intensely democratic people.
There are few class distinctions, and Split, being a free and
ancient city, would not feel inferior to Zagreb, for all its size
and comparative wealth. Nevertheless, perhaps Bishop Stross-
mayer had his part in the boy’s ease.

“ I speak foolishly,” said the Professor, when he started to
talk again, ” if I imply that the Bishop Strossmayer was an
inspiration to me, for, to tell the truth, I have never been inspired.
I have committed no great action, nor have I needed to. For
the Austrian Government never persecuted us in the grand
manner, it never called on us to be heroes, it merely pricked us
with pins, and all we had to do was to be gentlemen and philo-
sophers. My worst time was during the war, and that was not
so bad.” It appeared that as soon as Austria declared war on
Serbia all the men in Split who had shown signs of hostility
to the Austrian Government, which is to say all proihinent or
even respectable citizens, were arrested and sent on tour through
Austria and Hungary to be shown off publicly as Serbian
prisoners of war. “ I who know German as my own tongue,”
said the Professor, " had to stand there while they described
me as an Orthodox priest — that was because of my beard.
Certain circumstances concerning that imprisonment were
indeed very disagreeable. But let us not remember that, but
the good things the war brought us. It brought us our freedom
and it brought us many friends. Yes, many English friends.
For many English sailors and soldiers came here after the war,
and We liked them very much. I suppose you do not know

i6z BLACK LAMB AND GREY FALCON

Admiral William Fisher ? ” " No,” said my husband, " but I
know his brother, H. A. L. Fisher, the Warden of New College,
who is a great historian and one of the most charming people
in the world.” “ So is this man ! So is this man ! ” cried the
Professor. "He came here with the Fleet several times, and I
grew to love him like a brother. I tell you, he is like a hero of
old I ”

His eyes were glowing. Here, as in Serbia, there is very
little effeminacy, and no man puts himself under suspicion by
praising another ; so one is sometimes aware of a strong current
of love running from man to man, from comrade to comrade,
from hero to hero. The Professor spoke long of Admiral
Fisher, of his solid qualities, his wisdom and patience, and of
his lovely lightnesses, his capacity for a gay Homeric cunning,
and his tremendous laughter. “ Ah I ” he sighed at last. " I
have spoken so much of my friend, that without noticing it I
have drunk a great deal of red wine. This will not be healthy,
unless I drink a lot of black coffee. Is this coffee strong P ”
" I am afraid it is,” I said, " terribly strong.” " Why are you
afraid ? ” asked the Professor. " The stronger it is the healthier
it is. Did you not know that ? ”

After the Professor and my husband had talked for a while
of their favourite editions of the classics they fell silent ; and I
said, ” I have asked Philip Thompson to come in afterwards.
He could not come to dinner as he had a lesson, but he is coming
in at ten. I hope you will like him ? ” “I have not met him,”
said the Professor, “ but I know him by sight, and I am sure
I will like him.” “ Yes, he has a charming, sensitive appear-
ance,” I said. " It is not that I mean,” said the Professor.
" I am sure I will like him because he is a very pious Catholic.
I have noticed that he is most pious in his observances, and
during Lent I have gone into my church several times and found
him praying like a little child.” And when Philip Thompson
came in he greeted him with a special confidential and yet
reticent friendliness, as if he knew they had in common certain
experiences which, however, cannot be shared.

To start the conversation we talked of what we meant to do
in Split before we set off southwards down the coast. “ You
really must go up to the park on Mount Marian, that hill below
the town,” said Philip ; “ it is most beautiful up there among
the pines, looking over the sea and the islands.” “ Yes, indeed,"

DALMATIA >63

I said. " I was there last year, and I want to go again. It
interested me to see that in Robot Ad2un’5 drawings there isn’t
a tree on the hill, it is just bare rock. I suppose the Austrians
planted it." " They did not 1 " cried the Professor, leaping
from his chair. " And shall I tell you who did ? I myself, I did
it. I found in the archives uncontestable proof that there were
once trees on that hill, which were cut down to make Venetian
galleys. So I formed the idea that there could be trees there
again, and I started a society to do it. Many people thought
it was madness and my poor wife received anonymous letters
saying that I should be put into a lunatic asylum. But I col-
lected the money, and, believe me, it was Dalmatians who gave
it. No, the Austrians did nothing for us, nor the Venetians
either. We took the Venetian style of architecture, that is all ;
and I should not even say that if 1 were striving to be accurate.
It would be more truthful to say that the Venetians and the
Dalmatians both drew from the same sources inspiration to-
wards a new movement. . . .”

We were back again at Slav nationalism ; but we left it for
that permanent and mystical preoccupation which lies deeper
in the Dalmatian mind. " I do not think that the Venetians
have left any permanent mark on the life of the people," said
the Professor, " except perhaps the Venetian habit of blas-
phemy. Do you not find it dreadful, Mr. Thompson, the oaths
that one must hear as one walks in the streets of Split ? ” “I
find it most terrible," said Philip ; " they use the holy names
in a way that makes one clap one’s hands over one’s ears."
They shook their heads gravely ; and 1 saw the unusual spectacle
of a foreigner bom to the Catholic faith matching in fervour an
English convert. In the Professor I recognised the same Slavic
religious passion that had made dark and glowing the voices
of the men and women singing mass at Shestine ; but it seemed
to me that in him it was not only sweetened by the great sweet-
ness of his personality, but also that it was given a special in-
tensity by the long dolorous life of his town, and its reflections
upon its tragedy, its refusal to take the sorrow and waste of it
at their face value.

It is not to be doubted, as one goes about Split, that this
walled city has such a life, far more concentrated than the life
of our difiuse Western towns ; and that it has been engaged
in a continuous effort to find a noble interpretation of its experi-

i64 black lamb AND GREY FALCON

ence through piety. The Professor took us the next morning
to the Golden Gate of the palace, which is most recognisably
what it was in the days of Diocletian, a very handsome, creeper-
hung matter of niches and pillarets and a narrow door, which
modern times have pierced with an unending thread of neat and
supple Splitchani hurrying down to the harbour. Near this
Gate we climbed a stairway, and a door was opened by a nun,
who led us up more stairs into a little church built in the thick-
ness of the palace walls. It is about eleven hundred years old,
and though it is defaced by hideous bondieuseries of the modem
Roman Catholic Church, it remains infinitely touching because
of its slender stone screen, because of the carvings on that screen
which write in shapes as fresh as dew the faith of a people that
they have found a beneficent magic to banish the horrors of life.
Beside us the nun spoke on and on to the Professor, her voice
stilled with amazement, in words that also were as fresh as dew.
She was telling him that the Mother Superior of that tiny order
which guards this Church of St. Martin was growing very old
and very sick, but was showing great fortitude. Though she
spoke calmly she took nothing for granted ; this might have
been the first time that pain and fortitude had shown themselves
on earth. She was among those who will not suffer any event
merely to happen, who must examine it with all the force of the
soul and trace its consequences, and seek, against all prob-
ability, an explanation of the universe that is as kind as human
kindness.

We went, later in the morning, to another church, built in
honour of the Virgin Mary actually within one of the gates, over
an archway. It is not specially interesting ; one has seen its like
all over Southern Europe, grey and pliant in its line, a gentle
boast that if one has but faith it needs no more than the strength
of a lily to withstand life. This, like many of the smaller churches
in the Dalmatian towns, belongs to a Confraternity ; about
twenty townsmen sustained it, used it as the centre of their
devotions and the means of their charity, and there married
their wives and christened their children and were buried. It
was shown to us by one of this Confraternity, a plasterer, who
had left his work to do the Professor this courtesy. Wearing
his working clothes, which were streaked with white plaster,
he stood still and stiff like a page in a more than royal household,
showing, subjects the throne-room, the plain transmitter of a

DALMATIA

«<S

tradition which we had recognised earlier that day.

We had recognised it in the Temple of Aesculapius, which
lies on the other side of the courtyard from Diocletian’s mauso-
leum and is now the baptistery. This change would not have
surprised Diocletian, for the last glimpse that we have of his
personal life is his irritation at the refusal of his Christian stone-
masons to make him a statue of Aesculapius. There we saw
a tenth-century stone slab, roughly carved, which is said by
some to represent the adoration of Christ and by others the
homage paid to a Croatian king by his subjects. It does not
matter which it is. What is important is that the sculptor,
wishing to depict magnificence, whether earthly or super-
natural, saw it in Byzantine terms. After the Western Roman
Empire had collapsed Dalmatia had thirty years of dangerous
independence and then fell under the Eastern Empire, under
Byzantium. That empire was a real fusion of Church and
State ; the Emperor was given absolute power over his subjects
only because he professed absolute subjection to God, and the
ceremonial of his court was a religious ritual. That slab exists
to show that this conception of government by holy ballet
deeply impressed the imagination of the governed people, even
on its furthermost frontiers.

The devout grace of the workman, which, though it had an
instinctive basis, had been borne as far from that by art and
discipline as the Gutirds have been removed in their drill from
the primitive emotion of ferocity, proved that the Byzantine
tradition had made other signs of vitality than mere diffusion.
This man was a Slav. The fair hair, the high cheek-bones, the
sea-blue eyes showed it. Byzantium had struck new roots in the
race that had come into the Balkans from the mid-Russian
plains as pure barbarians, untouched by anything that had
happened during the first centuries of the Christian era, and
apparently as inaccessible to Christian influence as any race on
earth. Without pity, they killed and tortured ; without purpose,
they burned and laid waste. They came down to the Dalmatian
coast on a mission of ruin, in the company of the Huns and
Avars. But it happened that the Huns and the Avars turned on
and reduced them to slaves, and they rose in revolt. Angry
young men ran about shouting. They were heard by the Byzan-
tine Emperor Heraclius, who promised that if they drove the
Huns and Avars out of Illyria they might settle the land as

VOL. I M

i66

BLACK LAMB AND GREY FALCON

vassals of the empire. He imposed a further condition that
they must adopt Christianity. Who could have foretold that
out of this marriage of convenience between the Slav people
and the Church would flower a great passion ? Who could have
foretold that a horde of murderers and marauders would be also
addicts to spiritual pursuits and the use of the intellect, believers
in magic and the existence of a reality behind appearances,
who would perform any ritual and carry on any argument that
promised a revelation of the truth ? History sometimes acts as
madly as heredity, and her most unpredictable performances are
often her most glorious.

Salonae

This was the grimmest Easter ; and when the Professor took
us up to the remains of the great Roman city, Salonae, which
should be one of the prettiest sights in the whole world, it was
nothing of the sort. Its pillars and steps and sarcophagi lie
among rich grass and many flowers under the high olive
terraces, overlooking the sea and its many islands, the very
spot which Horace would have liked to visit with a footman
carrying a lunch basket behind him. It is one of the dishar-
monies of history that there is nothing that a Roman poet
would have enjoyed more than a Roman ruin, with its obvious
picturesqueness and the cue it gives for moralising. But we
could not enjoy it at all, for sharp rain scratched our faces all
the four miles we drove from Split, and at Salonae it grew
brutal, and we were forced into a little house, all maps and
inscriptions, built by the great Bulitch to live in while he was
superintending the diggings, and since his death converted
into a museum.

We were not alone. The house was packed with little girls,
aged from twelve to sixteen, in the care of two or three nuns.
They were, like any gathering of their kind in any part of the
world, more comfortable to look at than an English girls’ school.
They were apparently waiting quite calmly to grow up. They
expected it, and so did the people looking after them. There
was no panic on anybody’s part. There were none of the un-
happy results which follow the English attempt to make all
children look insipid and docile, and show no signs whatsoever
that they will ever develop into adults. There were no little

DALMATIA

167

girls with poked chins and straight hair, aggressively proud of
being plain, nor were there pretty girls making a desperate pre-
cocious proclamation of their femininity. But, of course, in a
country where there is very little homosexuality it is easy for
girls to grow up into womanhood.

Still, I wondered what the little dears were learning up at
Salonae. I suspected that they were receiving an education
with a masculine bias. Indeed, I knew it, for they were being
educated by nuns, who are women who have accepted the
masculine view of themselves and the universe, who show it
by being the only members of their sex who go into fancy dress
and wear uniforms as men love to do. I feared that in this
particular background they might be instilling into their charges
some monstrous male rubbish. It was even possible that they
were teaching them the same sort of stuff about the Romans
which I learned when I was at school : panegyrics of dubious
moral value, unsupported by evidence. There is, Heaven knows,
enough to be said in their favour without any sacrifice of honesty.
I can bear witness to it. I was at school in Scotland, and
therefore, owing to the strange dispensations of that country
in regard to the female, learned Latin and no Greek, a silly,
lopsided way of being educated. But even for this one-eyed
stance on the classics I am grateful, though I was slow-witted
at learning that and all other languages, and have forgotten
most of what I knew. It gave me the power to find my way
about the Romance languages ; it gave me a sense of the past,
a realisation that social institutions such as the law do not
happen but are made ; it gave, and gives, me considerable
literary rapture. I like a crib, indeed some might say that
I need a crib ; but once I have it I enjoy my Latin verse
enormously. To this day I am excited as I read that neatest
possible expression of the wildest possible grief —

Floribus Austrum

Ferditus et liquidis immisi fontibus apros.

It also seems to me that the modem mind cannot be fully
understood until one has gone back to Latin literature and seen
what European culture was like before it was injected with the
ideas of St. Augustine.

But I regret that to give me this pleasure and information
my teachers should have found it necessary to instruct me.

1 68 BLACK LAMB AND GREY FALCON

with far more emphasis than was justified by the facts in their
or anybody else's possession, that the Roknan Empire was a
vast civilising force which spread material and moral well-being
all over the ancient world by its rule. I was taught that this
was no mere accident : that the power to extend their rule by
military means sprang from an intellectual and moral genius
that made them able to lay down the best way of living for the
races they subdued. I find these assumptions firmly embedded
in the mass of literature written by people who received a
classical education, especially if it had the same Latin bias as
mine, and expressed even more passionately in literature
written by people who have not had any education at all. Every
year I grow more critical of them. We have no real evidence
that the peoples on which the Roman Empire imposed its
civilisation had not pretty good civilisations of their own, better
adapted to local conditions. The Romans said they had not ;
but posterity might doubt the existence of our contemporary
French and English cultures if the Nazis destroyed all records
of them. We may at least suspect from the geniuses of African
stock who appear within the Roman Empire, that when Rome
destroyed Carthage, dragging the plough three times through
the land, she destroyed her equal or even her superior. The
great work by Monsieur Camille Julian on the History of Gaul
suggests that when Rome came to France she frustrated the
development of a civilisation of the first order ; and Strzygowski
doubts whether she did not bring disorganisation to the Germanic
tribes. It appears probable from the researches of the last
few years, which have discovered codes of law, far from rudi-
mentary, among all the contemporaries of the Romans, even
to the nomads, that they might have got on with their social
institutions very satisfactorily if they had not been obliged to
fight against the external efforts at their betterment. And it
seems very probable that Rome was able to conquer foreign
territories because she had developed her military genius at the
expense of precisely those qualities which would have made
her able to rule them. Certainly she lacked them to such an
extent that she was unable to work out a satisfactory political
and economic policy for Rome itself and perished of that
failure.

I am sure of it, those little girls were being taught that they
should be proud because Split was the heir to a Roman city.

DALMATIA

169

Yet neither I nor anybody else knows whether or not the con-
quest of Illyria by the Romans was not a major disaster, the
very contrary to an extension of civilisation. Ill}rria had its
past. It was linked with Greek history, and had a double tie
with Macedonia of alternate enmity and alliance. Alexander
the Great had Illyrian princesses for his mother and grand-
mother, and he and his father both fought great campaigns
against their country. In the Roman period we know little
about Illyria save from Roman sources, but even they suggest
a considerable culture. They had an extremely able and heroic
queen, Teiita, who was not the sort of monarch that can be
raised from a tribe in skins ; and while she and her subjects
are accused of piracy, examination proves this a reference to
efforts, which history would regard as creditable if they had been
undertaken by the Romans, to conquer the Adriatic archi-
pelago. It is also brought up against Teiita that she murdered
two of three Roman ambassadors who were sent to accuse her
people of unmannerly ways at sea. But it is said that these
were murdered by brigands outside the Illyrian frontiers ; and
some heed had better be given to Polybius, a Roman of the
Romans, when he explains why the Senate once made war
on the Illyrians :

Since the Romans had expelled Demetrios of Pharos from Illyria
they had completely neglected the Adriatic seaboard ; and on another
hand the Senate wished to avoid at all costs that the Italians became
effeminate during a longstanding peace because it was more than
eleven years since the Persian war and the Macedonian Expedition
had ended. In undertaking a campaign against the Dalmatians they
would reawaken the fighting spirit of the people at the same time that
they would give the Illyrians a lesson and would force them to submit
to the domination of Rome. Such were the reasons why Rome
declared war on the Dalmatians ; but the excuse which was given
to the other nations was the insolence with which they had treated the
ambassadors.

Little girls of Salonae, try to work out this sum on your
fingers. It took Rome two hundred and fifty years of war to
bring peace to the Illyrians. Then they had fifty years or so
of disturbance, and a hundred years of peace, which I cannot
but think they could have procured for themselves, since they
had then to take over the government of Rome and provide the
long line of Illyrian emperors. They were then precipitated into

170 BLACK LAMB AND GREY FALCON

an abyss of unrest anjJ catastrophe, of which the worst feature,
the barbarian invasions, owed its horror largely to Roman
expansion. If Italy had been content with heiself as a unit and
had developed on a solid economic basis, and if Ill)Tia had been
allowed to look after her own affairs, they might have put up a
far more effective resistance to the invaders. No, the sum do^
not work out. Remember, when the nuns tell you to bewail
of the deceptions of men who make love to you, that the mind
of man is on the whole less tortuous when he is love-making
than at any other time. It is when he speaks of governments
and armies that he utters strange and dangerous nonsense to
please the bats at the back of his soul. This is all to your dis-
advantage, for in love-making you might meet him with lies of
equal force, but there are few repartees that the female governed
can make to the male governors.

Nevertheless, it was sweet for all of us, nuns and the little
dears, the Professor and my husband and me, to go out when the
rain had stopped and walk among the Roman ruins of Salonae.
Grey and silver were the olive-leaves shining in the timid sun-
light, dark grey the wet ruins, silver-grey the tall spiked aloes
and blacker than green the cypresses, black the mountains be-
hind us, silver the sea that lay before us, and grey the islands
that streaked it ; and at our feet storm-battered flowers looked
like scraps of magenta paper. The Professor was gay, as birds
are after rain. He read us inscriptions, lending them a sweet-
ness that was not in their meaning from the enjoyment of
Latinism which had been mellowing in his soul since his youth,
and guiding us to the stony stubs and plinths and stairways of
temples, baths, churches, the city walls, the city gate, that had
been battered less by time than by wars. Again and again the
place had been taken and retaken by the Goths and the Huns
before the Avars finally smashed it in 639. It is for this reason
that the churches in this city have the majesty of a famous battle-
field. Here Christianity's austere message that it is better not
to be a barbarian, even if victory lies with barbarism, was tested
in the actual moment of impact with barbarians, in face of a
complete certainty that victory was to be with barbarism. In
the baptistery of the cathedral the chamber round the font still
stands. There can still be seen the steps down which the naked
men, glistening with the holy oil and reeling with the three days’
fast, descended to the holy waters, to be immersed in them three

DALMATIA

»7»

times and lifted out, glorious in the belief that the death that
was closing in on them was magically changed to joy and salva-
tion. From the most coldly rationalist point of view it must be
pronounced that they were not mistaken. Complete victory was
given here to the barbarians ; on this spot they followed their
nature in all its purity of destructiveness, its zeal of cruelty.
But the gentle virtue of the Professor, the dedicated fineness of
the plasterer in the Confraternity chapel, showed that the stock
of the christened men lived still and had not been brutalised.

It was right that the nuns should be trailing the little dears
round the site of this miracle of which they formed a part. But I
passed one of the nuns and remarked as I had done before, that
the rank and file of the female religious order present an un-
pleasing appearance because they have assumed the expression
of credulity natural and inevitable to men, who find it difficult
to live without the help of philosophical systems which far outrun
ascertained facts, but wholly unsuitable to women, who are born
with a faith in the unrevealed mystery of life and can therefore
afford to be sceptics. I feared very much that the nuns’ charges
would be fed a deal of nonsense along with the bread of
truth. They would be taught, for example, to honour those
claims of the Church which reflect no reality and spring from
certain masculine obsessions of its ecclesiastics : such as its
pretension to be unchanging, to have attained in its first years
a wisdom about all matters, eternal and temporal, of which it
has made a progressive disclosure, never contradicting itself.
We are, of course, at liberty to imagine that the Church would
be a nobler institution if it knew no alteration ; even so it does
no harm if we dream that we could all be much happier if our
bodies remained for ever young and fair. But these are day-
dreams and nothing else, for the Church changes, and we grow
old. There was evidence of it, written here on the wet grey
stone.

" Look,” said the Professor, “ this is one of our most in-
teresting tombs, which is also very touching.” Here a husband
had laid to rest his beloved wife ; and in the inscription he
boasted that he had brought her to his home when she was
eighteen and had lived beside her in chastity for thirty-three
years. His very grief itself must have been made serene by his
consciousness that by their abstinence they had followed the
approved Christian course. These were the days when Theodore

172 BLACK LAMB AND GREY FALCON

the Conscript vras enraged against paganism because Juno had
twelve children. To some this multiplication of divinities might
seem as beautiful as the birth of a new constellation, but this
Christian it made cry shame on “ a goddess who littered like a
sow ” ; and he died for his opinion, frustrating the intended
moderation of the authorities by firing her temple. About
this time St. Jerome declared that he valued marriage only
because it produced virgins, and advised a widow against re-
marriage in terms which remind us that he was Dalmatian,
and that the inhabitants of this coast have never been noted for
understatement. " The trials of marriage,” he told the Lady
Furia, " you have learned in the married state ; you have been
surfeited to nausea as though with the flesh of quails. Your
mouth has tasted the bitterest of gall, you have voided the sour
unwholesome food, you have relieved a heaving stomach. Why
would you put into it again something which has already proved
harmful to you. The dog is turned to his own vomit again and
the washed sow to her wallowing in the mire.” This married
pair of Salonae, eager for salvation, must have believed that they
could not be denied some measure of it, since they had allowed
themselves to be groomed in barrenness by the Church.

They would have felt amazement had they known that, some
few centuries later, the Church would have persecuted them, even
to death, for such wedded chastity. For over this coast there
was to spread from the hinterland of the Balkan Peninsula the
Puritan heresy know as Paulicianism or Patarenism or Bogo-
milism or Catharism, knowing certain local and temporal varia-
tions under these names, but ail impassioned over the necessity
of disentangling the human spirit from the evilness of matter
and convinced that this was immensely facilitated by the practice
of virginity. It had the advantage of appealing to that love of
the disagreeable which is one of the most unpleasant charac-
teristics of humanity, and it became a serious rival to the ortho-
dox churches, who attacked it not only by reason but by Are
and sword. Since it laid such emphasis on virginity, the
ecclesiastical authorities came down like wolves on any married
pairs whom gossip reported as not availing themselves of their
marital privileges. So far was this recognised as a test that a
man accused of heresy is said to have brought forward as proof
of his orthodoxy that he drank wine and ate meat and swore
and lay with his wife. Therefore this couple of Salonae, had

DALMATIA

173

they practised this wedded chastity on the same spot five or six
hundred years later, would not have been granted thirty-three
years to do it in. They would have had a fate quite indistinguish-
able from that of the Christian martyrs whom they revered, but
they would have ranked as pagans or lower. Yet even that
change in the Church’s attitude they might have felt as less con-
founding than the later change, which would have regarded it
as a matter of indifference whether they lived in abstinence or not,
provided that they did not prevent the begetting of children in
any intercourse they might have. That yawn in the face of their
thirty-three years might have seemed worse than martyrdom.

It might have been sad to watch the little dears in their blue
coats and straw hats being inducted into male superstition
among the sarcophagi on a dampish day ; but the Professor
took us to a tomb that gave reason for hope that they would
suffer no harm, being protected by their own female nature.
The Latin of the inscription was so bad that it must have been
erected at a time when the ancient world was suffering its last
agony. In that hour, when the earth trembled and the columns
were falling, a good creature set up this stone in honour of her
departed husband. He was so strong, she said, that she had
twins some months after he had died, and she had loved him
very much. Finally with a tremendous gesture she put out her
arm and drew together two conceptions of the universe to shield
him from all dangers, and commended him to the mercy of
both Jesus Christ and the Parcae. She did what she could
before the darkness came, acting out of sound sense and good
feeling, though with a tendency to idealise virility ; and we
may suppose that the little dears would do as much, whatever
they were taught.

Trogir

The steamer which makes the hour’s journey from Split to
Trogir was full of Germans, and I wondered more and more at
the impossibility of learning the truth. I have been given to
understand, partly by what I have read and heard, and partly
by parades I have seen in Germany, that Germans are a race of
beautiful athletes tense with will, glossy with efficiency, sinister
with aggressiveness. The German tourists who had surrounded
us in every hotel and on every steamer since we got to Dalmatia

174 BLACK LAMB AND GREY FALCON

were either pear-shaped fat or gangling thin, and in any case
wore too much flesh packed on the nape of the neck, and were
diffident, confused, highly incompetent as travellers, and not
at all unkindly. There was, I suppose, no contradiction here,
only proof that Germany has been divided into two nations, a
pampered young pretorian guard and the badgered, under-
nourished, unregarded others. These were the others. But they
also were of Hitler’s Germany ; for the steamer dawdled along
the coast from portlet to portlet, and on each landing-stage there
were standing a crowd of Dalmatians, tall, lean, upright in
pride of body. The tourists stared at them and spoke of them
as if they were odd and dangerous animals. The German
hatred of the Slav had been revived and reinforced.

Across a milk-white sea, with two silver hydroplanes soaring
and dipping to our right and left, we came to the town of
Trogir, which covers a minute island, lying close to the coast,
in the lee of a larger island. It is one of those golden-brown
cities : the colour of rich crumbling shortbread, of butter-scotch,
of the best pastry, sometimes of good undarkened gravy. It
stands naked and leggy, for it is a walled city deprived of its
walls. The Saracens levelled them, and the Venetians and the
Hungarians would never let them be rebuilt. Now it looks like
a plant grown in a flower-pot when the pot is broken but the
earth and roots still hang together. On the quay stand Slavised
Venetian palaces with haremish lattice-work fixed to screen the
stone balconies, to show that here West meets East, brought
thus far by Byzantine influence and perpetuated by the proximity
of the Turks. Behind them lies a proof that life is often at once
mad and consistent, in the manner of dreams. Petronius
Arbiter’s Satyricon lives in the mind long after reading as a
fevered progression of flights through a cityful of twisting alleys.
Trogir’s alleys turn and writhe like entrails. It was in Trogir
that the codex of the Satyricon was found in 1650. It was not
written there, of course. If it had been there would be nothing
startling in the resemblance between the work and the town.
But it came to light here, after centuries of loss. The appro-
priateness is as exquisite as the colour of the town, as its spires.

The appropriateness went further still : for Petronius Ar-
biter was by nature a Puritan, who had he been bom in due
time would have found himself at home as a Paulician or
Patarene or Bogomil or Catharist, or in any other of those

DALMATIA

«7S

heresies which were based on the Persian faith of Manichaean-
ism, which held that matter was evil, and sex a particularly evil
manifestation of it.

Foeda in coitu et brevis voluptas est

£t taedet Veneris statim peractae.

Gross and brief is the pleasure of love-making, he says, and
consunnmated passion a shocking bore. He goes on to beg his
beloved therefore that they should not mate like mere cattle,
but should lie lip to lip and do nothing more, to avoid toil and
shame. The meaning of this exhortation lies in Trimalchio's
Supper, which shows Petronius to have been homosexual and
fearful of impotence with women; and perhaps the same ex-
planation lay behind most followers of these heresies. But
he rationalised his motives, and so did Trogir. This was an
inveterately heretic city.

In its beginning it was a Greek settlement and later a
Roman town, and then it was taken over in the dark ages by
wandering Paulicians. In the twelfth century the town was
sacked by the Saracens, and the inhabitants were dispersed
among the villages in the mainland. That, however, did not
break the tradition of heresy, for when the King of Hungary
collected them and resettled them on their island they soon
fell under the influence of Catharism, which was sweeping
across the Balkan Peninsula from Bulgaria to Bosnia and
Herzegovina and the coast. This recurrence is naturai enough.
Manichaeanism — for these heresies might as well be grouped
together under the name of their parent — represents the
natural reaction of the earnest mind to a religion that has aged
and hardened and committed the sin against the Holy Ghost,
which is to pretend that all is now known, and there can now
be laid down a system of rules to guarantee salvation. In its
origin it was a reaction against the extreme fatalism of Zoro-
astrianism, which held that man’s destiny was decided by the
stars, and that his only duty was to accomplish it in decorum.
Passionately Mani created a myth that would show the universe
as a field for moral effort : inspired by Christianity as it had
passed through the filter of many Oriental minds and by a
cosmology invented by an Aramaic astronomer, he imagined
that there had been in the beginning of time a kingdom of light
and a kingdom of darkness, existing side by side without any

176 BLACK LAMB AND GREY FALCON

commixture, and that these had later been confused, as the
result of aggression on the part of the deirkness. This was the
origin of the present world, which Mani very aptly called The
Smudge. It became the duty of all men who were on the side
of the light, which was identified with virtue and reason, to
recover the particles of light that have become imprisoned in
the substance of darkness, which was identified with vice and
brutishness.

This is actually an extremely useful conception of life. But
Manichaeanism was handicapped by the strictly literal mind
of the founder and his followers, who believed that they were
not speaking in allegory but were describing the hard material
facts of the universe. When they spoke of the Signs of the
Zodiac as dredges bringing up rescued particles of light to
store them in the sun and moon, they meant quite squarely
that that is what they thought the constellations were. This
literalness turned the daily routine of the faithful into a treasure-
hunt, sometimes of an indecorous nature. Excrement was
obviously part of the kingdom of darkness, if ever anything
was. Hence it became the duty of the Manichaean priests, the
" elect ”, to take large doses of purgatives, not furtively. This
routine became not only ridiculous but dangerous, as the
centuries passed and the ingenious medieval European began to
use it to serve that love of the disagreeable which is our most
hateful quality. Natural man, uncorrected by education, does
not love beauty or pleasure or peace ; he does not want to eat
and drink and be merry ; he is on the whole averse from wine,
women and song. He prefers to fast, to groan in melancholy,
and to be sterile. This is easy enough to understand. To feast
one must form friendships and spend money, to be merry one
must cultivate fortitude and forbearance and wit, to have a wife
and children one must assume the heavy obligation of keeping
them and the still heavier obligation of loving them. All these
are kinds of generosity, and natural man is mean. His mean-
ness seized on the Manichaean routine and exploited it till the
whole of an infatuated Europe seemed likely to adopt it, and
would doubtless have done so if the Orthodox and Roman
Catholic Churches had not hardened their hearts against it and
counted no instrument too merciless for use, not even mass
murder.

It is our tendency to sympathise with the hunted hare.

DALMATIA

»77

but much that we read of Western European heretics makes
us suspect that here the quarry was less of a hare than a
priggish skunk. In Languedoc there seems to have been some
sort of pleasant transmutation of the faith, but for the most
part heretical Europe presents us with the horrifying spectacle
of countless human beings gladly facing martyrdom for the
right to perform cantrips that might have been invented by a
mad undertaker. There was a particularly horrible travesty of
Extreme Unction called the' “ Endura ”. Every dying person
was asked by the priest whether he wanted to be a confessor
or a martyr ; if he wanted to be a confessor he remained without
food or drink, except for a little water, for three days, and if he
wanted to be a martyr a pillow was held over his mouth while
certain prayers were recited. If he survived in either case he
ranked as a priest. This horrid piece of idiocy was often used
as a means of suicide, a practice to which these heretics were
much addicted ; but as they believed that to suffer torture in
dying would relieve them from it in the next world, the real
enthusiasts preferred for this purpose to swallow broken glass.
The faith also gave encouragement to certain passive methods
of murder. The guardians of the sick were urged to extinguish
life when death was near ; and how this worked out may be
deduced from a case in France where a woman subjected her
infant grandchild to the Endura and then prevented its mother
from suckling it till it died. By this necrophily, and a pervasive
nastiness about sex, which went so far as to forbid a father to
be touched by his own daughter, even if he were very old and
she were his nurse, millions were raised to a state of rapture.
The whole of modern history could be deduced from the
popularity of this heresy in Western Europe : its inner sourness,
its preference for hate over love and for war over peace, its
courage about dying, its cowardice about living.

This cannot have been the whole truth about these heresies.
So inherently noble a vision must have produced some nobility,
its own particles of light cannot all have been dissolved. But
its achievements were trodden into the dirt by its enemies along
with its failures ; the Huns and the Avars never made a cleaner
job of devastation than the orthodox armies who were sent
against the Albigenses and the Catharists, and the heretics in
the Balkans were spared such demolition only because of the
Turkish occupation, which laid waste their institutions just as

178 BLACK LAMB AND GREY FALCON

thoroughly for quite other reasons. It happens that here in
Trogir there is presented a specimen of Manichaean culture.
In the centre of the town a cathedral stands in a flagged square.
They began building it in the thirteenth century to replace a
cathedral, six hundred years old, which had been burned by
the Saracens, and went on for a couple more centuries. It was
for long one of the homes of the Patarene heresy. Its con*
gregation were solidly adepts of the hidden faith, and so too,
at least once in its history, was the Bishop who ofiiciated at its
altar. In the porch to the bell-tower of this cathedral there is
a carved portal which is the most massive and pure work of
art produced by Manichaeism that I have ever seen. There
are, of course, specimens of heretic architecture in France, but
those were modified by an existing and flourishing French
culture. Here a fresh and vigorous Manichaeism has been
grafted on a dying and remote offshoot of Roman and Byzantine
culture.

It is the work of a thirteenth-century sculptor called Radovan,
or the Joyous One, and it instantly recalls the novels of
Dostoievsky. There is the same sense of rich, contending dis-
order changing oozily from form to form, each one of which the
mind strives to grasp, because if it can but realise its significance
there will be not order, but a hint of coming order. Above
the door are many scenes from the life of Christ, arranged not
according to the order of time ; in the beginning He is baptized,
in the middle He is crucified, in the end He is adored by the Wise
Men. These scenes are depicted with a primitive curiosity, but
also make a highly cultured admission that that curiosity cannot
be wholly gratified. It is as if the child in the artist asked,
“ What are those funny men doing ? ” and the subtle man in him
answered, “ I do not know, but I think . . .” On the outer edge
of the door, one to the right and one to the left, stand Adam and
Eve, opinions about our deprived and distorting destiny ; and
they stand on a lion and a lioness, which are opinions about the
animal world, and the nature we share with it. In the next
column, in a twined confusion, the sculptor put on record the
essence of the sheep and the stag, the hippopotamus and the
centaur, the mermaid and the apostles ; and in the next he
shows us the common man of his time, cutting wood, working
leather, making sausages, killing a pig, bearing arms. But of
these earthly types and scenes the child in the artist asked as

DALMATIA

179

eagerly as before, " What are those funny men doing ? ’’ and
the man answered as hesitantly, "I do not know, but I
think ...”

There we have an attitude which differentiates Mani-
chaeanism sharply from orthodox Christianity. If the common
man was actually interpenetrated with particles of light, or
divinity, as the heretics believed, and if this could be made
more or less difficult to recover by his activities, then each
individual and his calling had to be subjected to the severest
analysis possible. But if the common man has a soul, a re-
cognisable part of himself, as orthodox Christians believe, which
is infected with sin through the Fall of man and can be cleansed
again by faith and participation in the sacraments and adherence
to certain ethical standards, then it is necessary not to analyse
the individual but to make him follow a programme. This
difference corresponds with the difference between Western
Europeans and the Slavs, of which many of us receive our first
intimations from Dostoievsky. In the West conversation is
regarded either as a means of passing the time agreeably or
exchanging useful information : among Slavs it is thought to
be disgraceful, when a number of people are together, that they
should not pool their experience and thus travel further towards
the redemption of the world. In the West conduct follows an
approved pattern which is departed from by people of weak or
headstrong will ; but among Slavs a man will try out all kinds
of conduct simply to see whether they are of the darkness or of
the light. The Slavs, in fact, are given to debate and experi-
ment which to the West seem unnecessary and therefore, since
they must involve much that is painful, morbid. This spirit
can be recognised also in the curious pressing, exploratory
nature of Radovan's imagination.

But there are other resemblances also between Mani-
chaeanism and Slavism, between Radovan and Dostoievsky. For
one, the lack of climax. The orthodox Christian thinks that
the story of the universe has revealed itself in a design that
would be recognised as pleasing in a work of finite proportions ;
a number of people, not too great to be remembered, and all
easily distinguishable, enact a drama which begins with the
Creation, rises to its peak in the Incarnation, and is proceeding
to its consummation in the Day of Judgment and the coming of
the Kingdom of Heaven. The Manichaean believed that an

i8o BLACK LAMB AND GREY FALCON

immense crowd of people, often very difficult to distinguish
from one another, are engaged in recovering the strayed
particles of light, a process which can come to a climax only
when it is finished. This is reflected in Radovan’s work by a
curious levelness of inspiration, a lack of light and shade in his
response to his subject ; in the Slav’s readiness to carry on a
conversation for ever, to stay up all night : in Dostoievsky’s
continuous, unremitting spiritual excitement.

For another resemblance, there is the seeming paradox of a
fierce campaign against evil combined with a tolerance of its
nature. We cannot understand this in the West, where we
assume that sincere hostility to sin must be accompanied by a
reluctance to contemplate it and a desire to annihilate it. But
according to the Manichaean faith there was no need to take
action against darkness except when it enmeshed the light.
When the kingdom of darkness was existing side by side with
the kingdom of light without any commixture, then it was
committing no offence. That attitude can be traced in Radovan’s
faithful reproduction of life’s imperfect forms, in Dostoievsky’s
choice of abnormality as a subject. And there is yet another
resemblance which is particularly apparent in the work of
Radovan. The columns he carved with the representations of
the Smudge are borne on the shoulders of those who are wholly
of the darkness, Jews and Turks and pagans. It is put forward
solidly and without sense of any embarrassment that there are
those who are predestined to pain, contrary to the principles of
human justice. Calvin admitted this with agony, but there is
none here ; and Dostoievsky never complains against the God
who created the disordered universe he describes. This perhaps
because the Manichaeans, like the Greeks, did not regard God
as the Creator, but as the Arranger, or even as the Divine Sub-
stance which had to be arranged.

That the West should be wholly orthodox and not at all
Manichaean in its outlook on these matters is the consequence
of the zeal of the Roman Catholic Church. Quite simply it
physically exterminated all communities who would not abandon
the heretic philosophy. But the South-East of Europe was so
continuously disturbed first by civil war and Asiatic invasion
and then by the Turkish occupation, that the Eastern Church
could not set up an effective machine for the persecution of
heretics, even if it had had the temperament to do so. There

DALMATIA igi

the outward forms of Manichaeapism eventually perished, as
they were bound to do in time, partly because of the complicated
and fantastic nature of its legend and the indecorous and cruel
perversions of its ritual ; but its philosophy remained, rooted
in the popular mind before the Turkish gate closed down
between the Balkans and the rest of the world, to travel north-
wards and influence the new land of Russia, where after several
centuries it inspired a generation of giants, to the astonishment
of Europe. The Russian novelists of the nineteenth century
represented the latest recrudescence of a philosophy that had
too much nobility in it ever to perish utterly.

But one wishes one knew how this heresy compared with
orthodoxy as a consolation in time of danger : whether the
Manichaeans of Trogir were as firmly upheld by their faith
as the Christians of Salonae. The Manichaeans might claim
that it served them better, so far as barbarian invasion was
concerned, for they had one of the narrowest escapes from
annihilation that are written in all history. The Professor took
us on from the cathedral to see the scene of it. We walked out
of the city on to the quay through a gate which still keeps the
handsome stone lion of St. Mark that was the sign of Venetian
possession, surmounted by the patron saint of Trogir, St.
Giovanni Orsini, who was its Bishop about the time of the
Norman Conquest ; he was a remarkable engineer, who was
made a saint because he aided the Papacy in its efforts to
suppress the Slav liturgy. A bridge crossed a channel hemmed
with marble and glazed with the reflection of many cypresses,
and joined Trogir to a mainland that showed us a little level
paradise under the harsh bare limestone hills, where the pepper
trees dropped their long green hair over the red walls of villa
gardens, and Judas trees showed their stained, uneasy purple
flowers through wrought-iron gates. “ You see, it came very
near, so near that it could not have come any nearer," said the
Professor.

He spoke of the time in 1241, just after Radovan had
started his portal, when the Mongols, seeking to expand the
empire made for them by Genghis Khan, conquered Russia
and swept across Europe to Hungary, putting King Bela and
his nobles to flight. While he vainly petitioned the other
Christian powers to help, the invaders swept on towards Vienna
and then swung down to Croatia, burning, looting, killing.

VOL. I N

1 82 BLACK LAMB AND GREY FALCON

King Bela tried to stand finn at Zagreb, and sent his Greek
wife and their three children to seek safety on the coast. These
were ranging in panic between Split and the fortress of Kiish,
just behind it in the mountains, when the King joined them,
frantic with fear. It is doubtful if even our own times can
provide anything as hideous as the Mongol invasion, as this
dispensing of horrible death by yellow people made terrible as
demons by their own unfamiliarity. It is true that the establish-
ment of the Mongol Empire was ultimately an excellent thing
for the human spirit, since it made Asiatic culture available to
Europe ; but as Peer Gynt said, “ though God is thoughtful
for His people, economical, no, that He isn’t 1 ’’

The King and a tattered, gibbering multitude of nobles and
soldiers and priests, bearing with them the body of the saint
King Stephen of Hungary, and many holy objects from their
churches, trailed up and down the coast. Split received them
magnificently, but the King struck away the townsmen's
greetings with the fury of a terrified child. The shelter they
offered him was useless. They might not know it, but he did.
He had seen the Mongols. He demanded a ship to take him
out to the islands. Yellow horsemen could not ride the sea.
But there was none ready. He shouted his anger and went
with his Queen and his train to Trogir, which is within a short
distance of many islands. He fled to a neighbouring island,
which is still called " The King’s Shelter ". Some of his
followers went with him, but enough stayed in Trogir to carpet
the place with sleeping men and women when night fell. Worn
out by fatigue, by hunger, by fear, they threw themselves down
wherever they could : on the floors of all rooms, in every palace
and hovel, all over every church, under Radovan’s portal, on
the flags of the piazza and the alleys, on the quays. Their
treasures cast down beside them, they slept. Every boat too
was covered with sleeping bodies and upturned faces, and the
rocks of every island.

The Mongols came down on the coast. Nothing could stop
them. But at the sea they met a check. They had thought the
King must be at Kiish or Split, and they were repulsed at both.
The shelter offered by the Splitchani was not as negligible as
the King had thought. The Mongols were used to unlimited
space for their operations, and to attack fortifications from a
terrain bounded by the sea or sharply broken ground presented

DALMATIA

183

them with a new problem. But they found their way to Trogir ;
and on to this bridge across the channel they sent a herald
who cried out in a loud voice the minatory moral nonsense
talked by the aggressor in any age : " Here is the command*
ment of the Kaidan, the unconquerable chief of the army : do
not uphold the crimes of others, but hand over to us our enemies,
lest you be involved in those crimes and perish when you need
not." For the herald himself the delivery of this message must
have been the supreme moment of his life, either for perverse
joy or pain. For those who heard him tell us that he spoke in
Slav as a Slav. Either he must have been a traitor or a prisoner.
Either he was dooming his own people, whom he loathed, to
their ruin, and his words were sweet as honey in his mouth ;
or he loved his people, and he found his words bitter as gall.

The guards of Trogir made no answer, for they had been
ordered by the King to keep silent. Then we And, which is
not common, history following a line to which we are accustomed
in our private lives. We have all heard spoken tremendous
words which must unchain tragedy, we have all recognised
the phrase after which there can be nothing but love and
happiness ; and afterwards nothing has happened, life goes on
precisely the same, there is the vacuum of the anticlimax. But
in history the pushed boulder usually falls. In Trogir, however,
it was not so. After this tremendous moment, nothing happened.
The herald cried out his tremendous message, the guards kept
silent ; and presently the Mongols went home. It is thought
that they were considering whether they should ford or bridge
the channel, when they received news that their supreme chief,
Ogodai, the son of Genghis Khan, had died in Asia, and that
the succession was in dispute. They went back at a trot, just
taking time to sack and kill on their way, through Southern
Dalmatia, where they burned the lovely city of Kotor, and
through Bosnia, Serbia and Bulgaria. Trogir breathed again.
The King returned from his islet, and took his nobles and his
armies and his priests and the dead St. Stephen and the holy
jewels back to Hungary. But the Queen had to stay in Dalmatia
for some time, till her two little daughters, Catarina and
Margareta, died of a sickness they had contracted during their
flight. Their tombs can be seen in Diocletian’s mausoleum at
Split.

It is the kind of secret that time takes with it : whether the

i84 black lamb AND GREY FALCON

heretics of Trogir leaned on their faith and found it bore them,
in those hours when the Mongol sword hung over their heads.
But it can be deduced that in a general way it did them no
harm, for they came out of the Middle Ages into the Renaissance
strong in art and gallant. The interior of the cathedral, which
is two hundred years later than Radovan’s work, has a fine
form under its immensely rich vault, cut out of stone that has a
warm grey bloom ; and there is a baptistery, naughtily over-
decorated, but with an exquisite series of panels, in each of
which a cherub bearing a torch thrusts his way through ponder-
ous closing doors, ostensibly to illustrate some notion concerning
immortality, but more probably because the Renaissance had
a liking for fine little boys. And everywhere are small but
delicious palaces in the Venetian Gothic style, sweetly compact,
covered by elegance as by a creeper, with balconies and trellised
windows. There is one such, most lovely, facing the cathedral,
the residence of the Chippitch family. It is the very house
where there was found the codex of The Satyricon. Here in
Trogir it is as if events were caught in the rich architecture like
wasps in syrup.

When you go into the courtyard of the Chippitch Palace
you will find the figureheads of two old ships, one a delicate
Victory woman, the other a huge cock. Each was made on a
long iron stalk, held in a long iron hand. They are violent in
character, as if they were made by desperate men. One was
the figurehead of the ship manned and financed by Trogir and
commanded by Louis Chippitch at the battle of Lepanto in
1571 and the other belonged to the Turkish ship he captured.
He put them there when he came home and they have remained
there ever since. Again we were made to realise the debt the
West owes the people of this coast. The naval power of the
Turks was broken at Lepanto and never was reconstituted.
What broke it was a fleet composed of one hundred and fourteen
Venetian galleys, a hundred and three Spanish galleys, twelve
supplied by the Pope, four supplied by the Duke of Savoy,
three from Malta, and seven from the seven Dalmatian towns,
although by that time the coast was ravaged and poverty-
stricken. Even devastated Rab and Krk sent one apiece.
And Trogir’s contribution also was a magnificent offering from
poverty ; for the town was perpetually forced by the Venetians
to give money and supplies as bribes to the Turkish military

DALMATIA

i8s

and civil officials on the mainland, and it often knew real need.
Not only Rab but Trogir, and indeed every community on this
coast, paid in their gold and then blood for the security of the
West.

Since Trogir created such beauty and achieved such courage
under Venice, the visitor is tempted to believe that foreign
dominance was good for Dalmatia. But to think that is to be
as superficial as visitors to an orphanage, who at sight of children
with washed faces doing neat handwork forget the inevitable
wrongs of institutional life. The inhabitants of this coast were
looted of their money and their morals by their alien masters.
“ Come into the Dominican Church,” said the Professor, “ and
you will see how savage we were here, how horribly and beauti-
fully savage.” In that fine church there is a tomb erected by
a noble widow to her murdered husband. Carved as carefully
and reverently as any Madonna in a Pietk, an enraged lioness
lifts to heaven a muzzle soft and humid with the hope of ven-
geance. " It is the vendetta put into stone,” said the Professor.
“ Here the vendetta was a curse as it was in Corsica, because
God has made us a very quarrelsome people, and the Hun-
garians and the Venetians encouraged all our dissensions, so
that we should not be a united people and would therefore be
more easy for them to subdue.”

This policy became more formidable in the fifteenth century,
after Trogir had finally become Venetian. Refugees have
always presented a grave problem to the countries that have
received them. The culture they bring with them must clash
with the culture they find established in their new homes. When
the Turks overran the Balkan Peninsula some Bosnian and
Herzegovinian landowners became Moslems and were left in
possession of their lands, but those who clung to their faith fled
to Dalmatia. They were pure feudal lords, of a type that had
long disappeared from Western Europe, and they could not
understand the constitution of the Dalmatian cities, which gave
different rights to nobles and citizens, but on that basis defended
them with equal justice. The refugees could not understand
that they must treat with courtesy men of admittedly inferior
social status, and that the nobles also would be against them
if they failed to obey this convention ; and indeed some of the
nobles, who were undemocratic and hated the citizens, were
willing to side with the refugees in this. Thus there arose a

1 86 BLACK LAMB AND GREY FALCON

^rcat deal of civil strife which time would have corrected if the
Venetians had not seen in it an opportunity to obey that evil
precept, divide et impera. They secretly backed each party
against the others, and refrained from any legislative reform
that would have sweetened the situation.

But they went in for simpler misconduct. In the seven-
teenth century Trogir produced a superb example of the learned
gentleman of the Renaissance, Giovanni Lucius, or Yovan
Lutchitch, a descendant of one of the same Bosnian refugees.
He had studied in Rome and devoted his life to research into
Croatian and Dalmatian history. His great work De Regno
Dalmatiae et Croatiae is still a classic : he collected a gp'eat
many original documents, for though he wrote with patriotic
passion he was governed by the love of truth. But one of the
feuds that Venice encouraged struck him down. A member of
a noble family that had long been political enemies of the
Lutchitches, Paolo de Andreis, was himself a historian and was
himself engaged on a rival work. Dons will be dons, so he
informed the authorities that Lutchitch was searching the
archives to prove that the Venetians had violated the ancient
constitutions of the Dalmatian cities. Later when the Venetian
Governor-General came to visit Trogir and proposed to quarter
himself on the Lutchitch Palace, Yovan Lutchitch excused him-
self on the ground that his sister was gravely ill ; and again
Andreis went to the authorities, this time to denounce his rival
as a liar. Immediately Lutchitch was thrown into prison among
common criminals, while a squad of galley slaves cleared his
family out of their palace and the Governor-General took pos-
session of it. Lutchitch himself was about to be bastinadoed,
but the Bishop of Trogir saved him by appealing to the power
of the Church, and got him permission to take refuge in Rome,
where he died after thirty-four years of exile, an extravagant
punishment for a patriot.

“ We have so greatly needed peace, a little peace,” said the
Professor, “ but we have had hardly any. And I will take you
now to see a relic of the rdgime that gave us the fairest promise
of it. But I warn you, you will laugh at it, it is not as impressive
as it should be.” He took us round the wide hem of the city,
the space on its quays where the walls used to stand, to the north
end of the island. It did not take us long to get there, for this
town is incredibly small : one could walk round it in less than

THE GOLDEN DOOR OE DIOCLETIAN’S PALACE

MARMONT’S BELVEDERF. AT TRnr.TO

DALMATIA

187

ten mmutes. " Look at it well I " said the Professor, and we
gaped, for what we saw was surprising in this land which is
precious about its architecture, which will have nothing that is
not superb or ethereal or noble. On a patch of waste ground,
beside a medieval tower, there stands a little roofless temple
raised on a platform of rough-hewn stones, not at all antique,
not at all suggestive of sacrifices to the gods, strongly evocative
of an afternoon in the park. Almost it is a bandstand. " Is it
not French ? ” said the Professor. “ So neat, so irreverent to
the tragic solemnity of the place and its past, so fundamentally
admirable. You see the sea used to wash all round it. It is only
since we had a Yugoslavia that there have been drained the
marshes along the coast which gave the city malaria, and that
has involved deepening the main channel and drawing the sea
away from this shore. But when Marshal Marmont built this
belvedere it was right out among the waves, and he used to sit
there with his officers and play cards when it was very hot.
That we find very amusing, it is such a light-minded pleasure-
loving thing to do. And yet Marmont was a hero, a great hero,
and the only foreign ruler that was truly good for us. Though
we find it hard to forgive our conquerors, we could even find it
in our hearts to admit that it would have been a good thing if
the French had stayed here longer,”

It is really a very pretty belvedere ; and it has the sacred
French air of dealing respectfully and moderately with the little
things of life that are not sacred. It is better, yes, it is definitely
better, than the muzzle of the lioness wetly throbbing towards
the scent of blood. That it knows and has put behind it. The
sword was declared superseded in the delicious contentment
housed here, between the colunms, above the rippling Adriatic.
For indeed Marmont must have been extraordinarily happy
here, for a time. For one thing, he very greatly disliked his
wife, and here he was able to treat her extremely well from
a very great distance. For another, he adored the place itself,
and he was one of those who like the Slav flavour, who find all
other peoples insipid by contrast. And he liked the exercise of
independent power, as a Colonial Governor far from home.
“ He was, of course, a very vain man,” said the Professor in a
deprecating tone. I wondered why ; I have never been able to
see why people object to vanity, unless it is associated with
blindness to the qualities of others, and it often is not.

1 88 BLACK LAMB AND GREY FALCON

But if Marmont was not vain, he was a prig. He must have
been very well pleased with himself as he played cards in the
belvedere. He was living in accordance with reason and virtue.
He might have been very hot, but thanks to this intelligent
device he was less hot. He was building up a career, and while
many men have had to resort to violence and rapacity to serve
their ambition he was at once earning success and disseminating
peaceful manners, learning, and hygiene in a land previously
barbarian. He did not even compromise his integrity, for he
faced quite honestly the moral problem inherent in Empire. In
his memoirs, which he wrote well for a man of action, he admits
that a nation cannot hold alien territories without disingenuous
handling of subject populations, he sets down without disguise the
plain facts of certain occasions when he found it necessary to play
politics and foment misunderstandings among friends in order to
establish French authority. It may have happened that, while
he waited for a partner to put down a card, he set his eyes on
the dancing glass of the Adriatic, or the lion-coloured mountains,
trembling like the sea in the heat, and hypnosis made him aware
of the question the inner self perpetually asks itself : “ What am
I doing, and is it good ? " The answer he would have overheard
would certainly not have been boastful : it might have been
proud of the process in which it was engaged, but it would have
been modest regarding the extent of its engagement. The
universe was in disorder ; its sole offensiveness lay in its dis-
order. Man having been given, whether by a personal or an
impersonal force it hardly mattered, a vision of order, he could
correct the universe and regiment it into shining harmony.
Marmont had pointed his sword at a bulging plinth and bidden
it be straight ; he had raised his schoolmaster’s rod and a
fallen column was again erect. He would have claimed no
less, but no more, and would have been happy in an exact
accountancy of his limited effort.

But the place held a vaster, darker wisdom. On the edge
of the city stands this belvedere with its six frail pillars. In
the centre of Trogir stands the Cathedral with its portico
sombre with the prophecies of Radovan, with his announce-
ment that there is no hope within man, since he is a fusion
of Light and Darkness, like the universe itself; and that
he must work for the liberation of the Light and not for the
reform of the universe, because the universe is evil, by reason

DALMATIA

189

of this fusion, and must pass. This is a hard word, hard with
the intolerable hardness of mysticism. It is far harder, far
more mystical, than the message of orthodox Christianity. It
places on man a tremendous obligation to regard his life as a
redemptory act, but at the same time it informs him that he is
tainted through and through with the substance of damnation,
and that the medium through which alone he can perform this
act is equally tainted : and it assumes that this obligation is
worth accepting and will in fact be crowned with success,
simply because of the nature of the abstractions involved,
simply because Light is Light and therefore to be loved.

That it might be as Radovan thought was confirmed by
the experience of Marmont ; his later card games in the belve-
dere cannot have been happy at all. Napoleon was called by
many The Man, and in his manhood he agreed with the Mani-
chaean conception. He was at first a soldier of the Light.
Marmont must have felt that in working with him he was driv-
ing the Darkness engendered by the collapsed revolution out
of France, and out of disturbed Europe. He had, indeed,
almost no other grounds for liking the association. It is one
of the oddest examples of human irrationality that while most
of the people who really knew Napoleon well found him un-
lovable and something of a bore, innumerable people who were
not born until long after his death, and have nothing to go upon
except the accounts of these familiars, obstinately adore him ;
and these have blamed Marmont for coldness and ingratitude
to him. But as Marmont explains in his memoirs, he had
known Napoleon since his early youth and had never really
liked him, and he had no reason to feel gratitude to him, for
he had earned every step of his military promotion by concrete
achievements that would have been similarly rewarded in any
army. He worked with him because they both stood for the
same ideal of national order.

The darkness suddenly streamed out of Napoleon’s soul ;
the ray had been white, it was black. There was manifest in
his relations with his subordinates the same enjoyment of the
exciting discord irrelevant to the theme which is familiar
enough as a symptom of sexual degeneration, of incapacity for
love. Marmont has recorded in his memoirs, with the exquisite
accuracy of a perceptive but unimaginative man, the moment
when Napoleon sought to slake this appetite on him, to his

190 BLACK LAMB AND GREY FALCON

perturbation and disgust. During the iSog campaign Mar-
mont returned 4o headquarters to report after fighting a
brilliant and fatiguing engagement and was received by a
scowling and soured Napoleon, who grumbled at him for
nearly two and a half hours. When he went back to the hovel
where he was billeted he flung himself down in an agony of
weariness and humiliation, and was reduced to the extreme of
bewildered misery because the room began to fill up with more
and more people. Suddenly he found that they had come to
congratulate him. The two and a half hours of nagging had
been Napoleon’s way of adding spice to the promotion of
Marmont to the rank of Marshal : so might a lover, of the
sillier sort, pick a quarrel with the beloved before making her
or him a present. But Marmont was interested in the art of
war, in France, and in the establishment of the international
order he thought most favourable to France ; and he could
not imagine why his promotion from one rank of the army to
another, about which there was nothing unnatural, which was
according to routine, should be attended by discourtesy and
gross disregard for his feelings. He records it with restraint.
Napoleon had long been fallen when he wrote. But behind
the well-mannered writing sounds a perplexity. If Napoleon
thought I was good enough to be Marshal, which was pleasant,
why couldn’t he have been pleasant about it ? Marmont
would have liked pleasantness everywhere. The Light was
in him, seeking to establish its kingdom.

When he first went to Dalmatia it must have seemed that
the Light in him and in Napoleon was working to free itself
from the long captivity it had endured in these darkened lands.
A strong and peaceful Illyria emerging from the state of war
and anarchy that had lasted since nearly the beginning of
recorded time would have shone like the moon coming out of a
black cloud. There was a time in Napoleon’s life when the
whole of Europe appeared to be suffering defeat before France
only in order to rise again and put on an immortal brightness.
But in a few months the prospect changed. It was as if there
had been an eclipse ; the Manichaeans would have recognised
its nature. In Napoleon there seemed now to be nothing but
darkness. In Marmont’s letters he held up to Napoleon his
own conception of a radiant Illyria, part of a transfigured
Europe, and asked for support in realising it, in men, in money,

DALMATIA

191

in words. But Napoleon turned away, shutting his eyes as if
he could no longer bear the light. He ignored all Marmont’s
requests and replied in letters hot and sticky with roguishness,
or did not reply at all.

In the belvedere Marmont must have found it difficult to
keep his mind on his cards. In the end, we know, he threw them
in and pushed back his chair and strolled away, to leave Dal-
matia for ever. There was fault in him too. He was man also,
he was a fusion of good and evil, of light and darkness. There-
fore he did not want with his wholeness that there should be a
victory of light ; he preferred that darkness should continue to
exist, and this universe, the Smudge, should not pass away.
He showed it and so did all his reasonable kind, by leaving
power in the hands of Napoleon, who had long ceased to be
reasonable, who was now seeking disgrace as he had earlier
sought glory. He went to Spain, he went to Russia, against
the advice of his counsellors, for no other purpose than to make
a long journey and be benighted at its end. But the change in
him excited no horror in the people, rather their passion for him
rose to an orgasm, as if this were the climax to which his glory
had been but the preparation. The great men for whom
humanity feels ecstatic love need not be good nor even gifted ;
but they must display this fusion of light and darkness which is
the essential human character ; they must even promise, by a
predominance of darkness, that the universe shall for ever per-
sist in its imperfection.

After Napoleon had safely led back Europe to the limits of
frustration it preferred to Paradise, nothing happened in Dal-
matia fur a hundred years. Austrian rule was sheer negativism.
The Slavs were raised up in enmity against the Italian-speaking
sections, who were either such descendants of the Roman
settlers as had never amalgamated with the Slavs, or Venetian
immigrants. There was no coherence ; very little trade, since
the Austrian railway system was designed to encourage the
prosperity of Austria and Hungary and leave the Slav territories
isolated from the rest of Europe. In Trogir grass grew in the
streets and piazzas. But the tradition of its rich civic life was
not broken. After the war this town, like many another on the
Dalmatian coast, was coveted by the Italians, who one September
night in 1919 sent a small party of soldiers to seize it. It should
have been defended by eight Yugoslav soldiers, but these had

192 BLACK LAMB AND GREY FALCON

too ingenuously accepted hospitality by some pro-Italians on
the previous evening and were all unconscious. So when the
inhabitants woke up in the morning they found their town in
possession of Italian soldiers. There were, however, only five
families that were pro-Italian ; and the rest of the population
rushed at the invaders and disarmed them with their bare hands.
One woman ran at four men in charge of a machine-gun and
took it away from them, and many others chased out runaway
Italians who had taken refuge in the courtyards of the houses,
beating them with their fists and tearing away their helmets and
belts. " I do not tell you their names,” said the Professor, “ be-
cause it is a very disagreeable thing for a lady to have to commit
such violent acts, and these were not viragoes, they were ladies.
But I can assure you that they bore names which have been
distinguished in the annals of Trogir for many centuries, and
that they were none of them ignorant of their ancestors’
achievements."

It is a very quiet city now : an empty city, for it suffered
like Rab from a terrible visitation of the plague, and the popula-
tion has never replenished itself, because the malaria that raged
here till recently caused sterility. But it exists. That is to be
noted, for there is a legend all over Europe which leaves not
one of its stones standing upon another. Close by the Cathedral
there is a loggia which was the ancient hall of justice, undatable
because it was built of bits and pieces from the old town which
was destroyed by the Saracens and from near-by Roman settle-
ments. It was in ruins during the Austrian occupation, and it
was roofed and made decent by the Yugoslav Government.
Nevertheless in all anti-Slav circles it has become a symbol of
the barbarity of the Yugoslavs, because of a very small deface-
ment. It happened that on the wall behind the stone table at
which the judges used to sit there was placed during the late
fifteenth century a winged lion of St. Mark, surrounded by saints
and emblems of justice. Every Dalmatian town bears such a
symbol at one place or more, on a wall or a gate, or public
building, and always it is beautiful. The lion is always waved
and opulent, and reminds one that it was Bronzino and Paris
Bordone who first celebrated the type which we know now, in
brass instead of gold, as Mae West. To judge from photographs
the lion in the loggia was a specially glorious example of its
kind, a lilium auratum in stone. While the Austrians were in

DALMATIA

>93

Dalmatia the wind and the rain beat on this lion, but it was
properly sheltered after the Yugoslavs had done their repairs.

It unfortunately happened, however, that about Christmas-
time in 1932 some young men of Trogir got drunk, and their
larger, simpler emotions were liberated. They then remembered
that the Italians had tried to steal their city, and had not given
up the hope of doing so some day ; and they inflicted severe
damage on this lion and another at the port gate of the town.
They were not utterly destroyed. They still exist, in a quite
recognisable form, on the walls of a museum. This was one
of those incidents which prove it to be a matter of sheer luck
that man does not go on all-fours, but it obviously had no other
significance. Italy, however, took the opportunity to give an
extraordinary exhibition of her intentions towards Dalmatia.
There took place all over the country demonstrations against
the Yugoslavian Government, organised by two societies which
exist for the purpose of such mischief-making, Dalmatia Irre-
denta and Pro-Dalmatia. Mussolini himself declared that in
the mild hooliganism of the intoxicated young men, he saw “ the
clear expression of a mentality of hate that made no secret of its
opposition to Italy. ... It is a carefully premeditated plan.
. . . The responsible parties are to be found among elements of
the ruling classes. . . . The lions of Trogir are destroyed, but
in their destruction they stand stronger than ever as a living
symbol and a certain promise." To keep the peace the Yugo-
slavian Government had to eat dirt, and, what is worse, harden
its tradition of merciiessness towards its own people by sup-
pressing the counter-demonstrations against Italy which natur-
ally took place all over Yugoslavia.

The wickedness and absurdity of Mussolini’s proceedings
can be estimated if one imagines Great Britain making hostile
demonstrations against Ireland because some drunken boys in
Cork had destroyed a couple of Union Jacks that had been left
there during the English occupation. But that does not quite
express the perversity of the Italian attitude, for it must further
be remembered that Trogir had not belonged to Venice for a
hundred and forty years, at which time it would have been
impossible for a Roman or the inhabitant of any other Italian
city except Venice to feel any emotion whatsoever regarding
an insult to the Lion of St. Mark, except perhaps a lively
sympathy. This immense forgery of feeling led on to a forgery

BLACK LAMB AND GREY FALCON

194

of fact There spread all over Italy and into Central Europe,
and thence all over the world, a belief that the inhabitants of
Trogir had destroyed all the historic beauties of their town, and
even their entire town. “ What, you went to Trogir ? ” a
refugee German professor said to me in London, after my first
visit to Dalmatia. " But it cannot have been worth your while,
now that these barbarous Yugoslavs have levelled everything
worth looking at to the ground. Ah, if you had only visited it,
when I did, two years before the war ! You can have no idea
how beautiful it was then ! ” Medieval Europe was ignorant, it
believed in unicorns and mermaids, it debated how many angels
could dance on the point of a needle. The folly of modern
Europe provides .us with no agreeable decorative symbols, it
does not lead us to debate on the real fact of the different planes
of existence. It pretends for mean motives that a city which
stands steadily among the moving waters, its old buildings and
its old families as they have been for seven hundred years, is not.

SpUt III

My husband was reading to me from Count Voinovitch’s
HUtoire de Dalmatie a fairy story that they tell about the
Emperor Diocletian all over this coast and Bosnia and Herze>
govina and Montenegro. It is a variant of the story we all know'
about Midas. It seems that he had a ridiculous physical secret
which he could keep from all the world except his barber, a’
little matter of ears like an ass and horns like a ram. So his
barbers shaved him but once, and were never heard of again.
At last a barber who was the only son of a widow was told that
the next day he must shave the Emperor’s beard. He was
overcome with horror, but his mother told him not to despair,
and made him a little cake moistened with her own milk, and
said to him, “ While you are shaving the Emperor take a bit of
this cake.” When he did so, Diocletian smelt the curious
odour of the paste, and asked for a piece of it. He liked it,
but found the taste peculiar, and felt he knew it yet could not
name it. “ What did your mother use to moisten this cake ? ”
he asked. “ Her own milk,” answered the barber. " Then
we are brothers and I cannot kill you,” said the Emperor.
Thereafter the story follows familiar lines : the barber’s life is

DALMATIA 195

spared, but he is sworn to silen<%, and he is so inconvenienced
by the secret that he murmurs it to a reed, which is made into a
flute by the village children and repeats it whenever it is played.

“ How characteristic it is of the Slavs to keep on telling this
story,” said my husband ; " it is so packed with criticism of the
idea of power. The folk imagination that invented it is re-
sponsible to the majesty of the Emperor and his usefulness to
the community, and it recognises that he can exercise power
and that his subjects can obey him only if there is a convention
that he is superhuman, that he has none of the sub-human
characteristics which compose humanity. The Emperor must
therefore be permitted to commit acts in defence of this con-
vention which would be repulsive if an individual committed
them for his private ends. But here nature speaks, through the
mother, who is a superb example of the hatefulness of women
as Strindberg sees it. She pulls down what men have built up
by an appeal to the primitive facts of life which men have
agreed to disregard in order that they may transcend them.
She proves to the Emperor that after all he is an individual,
that the murder he commits for the sake of maintaining a useful
convention may be a social act but is also fratricide on a basis
of reality. But the story does not give her the victory either,
for it gives a warning that once a breach is made in that con-
vention, it must fall ; what the barber knows the village children
must know before long, and then there must be anarchy. The
story is perfectly balanced ; but it shows bias to have preserved
it, and that bias would make it very difHcult for Slavs ever to
settle down under a government, and lead a rangi political life.”

" I wonder what the woman really put in the cake," I said,
“ for it requires a great deal of explanation if the widowed
mother of a grown-up son should have any milk. But what on
earth are our friends doing ? It is half-past eight.” For we
were in our bedroom, waiting for a lady and her husband,
Mr. and Mrs. X., who were to take us to a charity festival in the
town, where there was to be a dance and a cabaret supper, and
there we were to meet other friends of ours, Mr. and Mrs. A.,
and spend the evening with the four of them. " Yes, something
must have gone wrong,” said my husband, “ for they said they
would come at seven.” " Then let us go downstairs and have
dinner,” I demanded. " No,” said my husband, " if we do
that we will eat a lot at dinner because it is so good, and then

196 BLACK LAMB AND GREY FALCON

we will have to eat more food at the dance, and we are effete
Westerners. If you are hungry, it is your own fault for rejecting
the waiter’s advice, and not keeping that nice cold palatschinken
by you.” And indeed it was only a few minutes later that Mr.
and Mrs. X. sent up a message to say that they were in the hall
of the hotel, but would be glad if we did not come down but
received them in our room, as they wished to speak to us on a
private matter.

As soon as they entered, Mrs. X., who was an exquisite
creature made of moonlight and soot-black shadows, cast from
her slimness her heavy coat, which fell from her like a declara-
tion in recitative. Both she and her husband, who was himself
exceedingly handsome, were in a state of excitement that recalled
Italian opera. It was tragic yet not painful, it was accomplished
and controlled, and yet perfectly sincere. What it was putting
forward as important, it in fact felt to be important. They both
began by apologising to us deeply, for having kept us waiting,
for not being able to offer us the most intense and comprehensive
hospitality possible. But they had found themselves unable to
carry out Mr. A.’s plan for the evening. Absolutely unable ;
and it was astonishing that Mr. A. could have conceived that it
should be otherwise. He would never have put forward such
a proposal had he not been exposed to alien influences, had he
not just returned from several years in the United States and
had his wife not been a Czech. This had, naturally enough, no
doubt, made him insensitive to the state of public opinion in
Split.

When the X.s had first received Mr. A.’s letter two hours
before, they said, warming up nicely, they had looked at each
other in horror. For it had presented them with a dilemma.
Mr. A. would not have put forward his proposal had it not
suited our convenience. Was it therefore their duty to overlook
the affront it offered to the public opinion of Split in order to
fulfil the Dalmatian ideal of hospitality ? To decide this they
had visited a friend, a judge ninety years old, of a very ancient
Splitchani family, who was a connection of Mr. X.’s mother.
He had told them that he considered the question immensely
delicate, but that he understood we had shown signs of sensibility
and it was therefore unlikely we would wish them to violate the
feeling of their birthplace. The judge had added that as we
were travelling abroad instead of being in England at the time

DALMATIA

197

of the Coronation, we were probably members of some party
which was in opposition to the Government, and would be the
more ready to understand their point of view. So Mr. and Mrs.
X. had gone to see Mr. and Mrs. A., who had seen their point
of view when it was explained to them, and had instantly
apologised, but had had to go to the festival all the same, as
they had promised to act as judges in some competition ; and
they had, indeed, framed an alternative plan for the evening
which we might perhaps consider, if we were not incensed
against hosts who altered their programme of hospitality for the
sake of their own honour.

We felt unworthy subject-matter for this excitement, and we
realised that there had been some monstrous over-estimation
of the delicacy of our sentiments. So might two comfortable
toads feel if the later Henry James and Edith Wharton at her
subtlest insisted on treating them as equals. “ Let me give you
some of the brandy I have brought from London,” said my
husband, and I could see that the poor creature was trying to
make a claim to some sort of fineness, even though it were other
than that which they were ascribing to us. We all sipped
brandy with an air of sustaining ourselves during a crisis.
Then they went on to explain that Mr. A. had forgotten that
whereas the charitable festival was being held for the benefit of
some fund for supplying the poor with medical attention, it was
organised by Dr. and Mrs. Y., emigrated Jews from Zara, the
Dalmatian town which has been handed over to the Italians,
who were almost the only prominent pro- Yugoslavians in the
town, and who might use this fund in cooperation with institu-
tions which ought to be ignored, because they had been founded
by the Government. The charity festival was therefore being
boycotted by all the considerable families in Split, of the social
level of Mr. and Mrs. X., or Mr. and Mrs. A. Other people
could take us, if we cared to go. But it was impossible, the
X.s assured us in something like a duet by the early Verdi,
impossible that they should do so.

We refrained from weirning them that some day they might
have something really worth worrying about ; and we intimated
that as we had promised a very civil shopkeeper friend of ours
to go to this festival, we should prefer to keep our promise.
This we did, and enjoyed a spectacle of nice-looking young
people performing with graceful awkwardness under the eyes

198 BLACK LAMB AND GREY FALCON

of adoring parents, of which we had seen the like in Exetv, in
Edinburgh and in Cleveland, Ohio. There ate a few institu*
tions which are universal, and it is pleasant when one proves
to be pretty and innocent. But the organisers, the doctor and
his wife, were interesting and pathetic. They seemed outside
the Splitchani tradition, not because they were Jews, but because
they belonged to that warm and idealistic and intelligent breed
of Jew that puts its trust in s3mthesis and centralisation. Always
they would assume that hatred and stupidity were peculiar
local conditions, which any general government would make
its business to correct ; and this optimism would be reinforced
by their knowledge that there does in fact exist a unifying
force, which on the whole is benevolent, in science. They were
both learning English, and they beamed as they spoke of it.
It appeared to them much more clearly than it did to me, that
they were associating themselves with Liberalism. But that
was only part of their buoyant Utopianism, which believed
that if a large enough number of charity festivals of this kind
were held, if enough people studied a language other than their
own, if enough vows of tolerance were taken by the State,
there would be an end to poverty, war and misery. I could
only hope that, holding such inoffensive views in our offensive
age, they might be permitted to die in their beds.

Our four friends, the X.s and the A.s, met us in the principal
cafd of the town after the entertainment, and we took an early
opportunity to ask them why they and their world were against
the Yugoslav State. Their first reply was simply to look very
handsome. Their eyes widened, their nostrils dilated. 'The
natural exception was Mrs. A., the Czech, who seemed, like
ourselves, a little gross by contrast. We were in effect watching
racehorses racing, beautiful specialised animals demonstrating
their speciality, which was opposition. I had to remind myself
that this concentration on opposition had substantially con-
tributed to the saving of Western Europe from Islam. Few of
us have as much reason to be thankful to the plainer and
blunter virtues as to this cloak and sword romanticism that I
saw before me ; and they themselves owed their very existence
to it. Only that had saved them from Rome, from the barbarian
invaders, from the Hungarians and Venetians, from the Turks,
from the Austrians. But all the same a Government which
was not seeking to destroy them but cooperate with them must

DALMATIA

199

find this attitude so maddening that it \rould be not unnatural
did it sometimes behave as if it were seeking their destruction.

" Tell me,” said my husband, " some specific things that
you find objectionable about Yugoslavia.” " Belgrade I ” ex-
claimed Mr. and Mrs, X. in one voice. " This country,” Mr. X.
explained, ” is fantastically and extraordinarily poor. You
would not believe how poor the poor people in our city are,
how poor nearly all the people in the country outside are. The
Government does nothing for us, but they take our taxes and
they spend them in Belgrade. They are putting up whole new
streets of offices, there is not a Ministry that hasn’t a palace for
its home. Is that fair, when down here we lack bread ? ” " It
was a wretched little village before the war,” said Mrs. X.,
” a pig-town. It made one laugh to see it, particularly if one
had been to Zagreb. But now they are turning it into a place
like Geneva, with public buildings six and seven store}rs high,
all at our expense." “ But do you not think that is necessary ? ”
asked my husband. “ For it was because Serbia had such a
capital as Belgrade was before the war, that the Austrian
Foreign Office used to treat the Serb diplomats as if they were
farm labourers come up to the great house with an impertinent
demand.” “ But the Serbs are not like us,” said Mrs. X.
vaguely. " They are not like us, they have not the tradition
that we have here in Split. And how can Belgrade ever be such
a beautiful town as our Split ? ”

“ I see the problem from a different aspect,” said Mr. A.,
“ because I have been in America for a very long time. It does
not shock me so much that Dalmatia should be governed from
Belgrade, for I have lived in Milwaukee for many years, and
things went very well there, though we were governed from
Washington, which was far further away from us than Belgrade
is from Split. And I have been to Washington, which is a fine
city, and I know it is right that the Government of a great
country should have impressive buildings. But my case against
Belgrade is that it governs badly. Oh, I know there is corrup-
tion md graft in American politics, but you have no idea what
it is like here. The trouble is not only that, as X. says, the money
goes to Belgrade, it’s what happens to it when it gets there.
It sticks to people’s palms in the most disgusting way. There
are ever so many people in Belgrade who have made fortunes,
huge fortunes, by peculation. And that’s the only activity in

200

BLACK LAMB AND GREY FALCON

which they ever show any efficiency. For the idiotic muddle
of the administration is beyond belief.”

” It is worse then than it was under the Austrians ? ”
asked my husband. They looked at him in astonishment. " Not
at all," said Mr. A. ; “ the Austrians were not inefficient at all.
They were assassins. Look what they did here with the rail-
ways 1 ” They all broke out into cries of anger and disgust.
“ Why, think of it,” said Mr. X., “ the railway stopped outside
Split, so as to make sure we should be nothing of a port.”
" And we could not go to Austria except through Budapest,”
said Mrs. X. ” That was the Hungarian influence, of course,”
said Mr. A. “ But Austria permitted it,” said Mr. X. " Per-
mitted it ! ” cried Mrs. A., the Czech ; “ tell me when those who
speak German have not rejoiced in humiliating the Slavs.
And there are people in your country,” she said to us, “ who
are sorry for the German-speaking minorities in Czecho-
slovakia. There are beings so charitable that they would get
up funds to provide feeding-bottles for baby alligators.”

But my husband persisted. “ Then you found the Austrians
efficient in what ? Assassination only ? ” “ In that certainly,”
said Mr. A., ” but they were also far more efficient than our
present government in the everyday routine of administration.
Take the case of my family. Several of them have been
university professors. Now, the old ones, who retired under
the Austrians, never had any difficulty in getting their pensions.
They drew their pay, they retired, they filled in papers, they
drew the appointed sum. Nothing could have been simpler.
But now there is terrible disorder. I have an uncle, a Professor
of Mathematics, who retired months ago. He fulfilled all the
requisite formalities, but he has not yet touched a penny of his
pension. The papers have not come through from Belgrade,
for no other reason than sheer muddle.” "And it is so, too, in
my profession,” said Mr. X. " I am a lawyer, it is the calling
of my family, and some of my older relatives are judges. It is
the same with pensions, and appointments and even dates for
trials, everything that comes from Belgrade. There is endless
bother and muddle. And we are not accustomed to such things
in Split, for here we manage our affairs simply it may be, but
with a certain distinction.” ” Ah, yes,” said Mrs. A., “ if they
would leave us Splitchani to manage our own affairs, that would
be all we ask.”

DALMATIA

aoi

" But there are affairs which are certainly your own, but
which equally you cannot maftage,” said my husband. " You
could not yourselves have got rid of Austria, and you cannot
yourselves protect yourselves if she comes back, or if Italy
wants to establish the same domination over you.” They looked
at him with preoccupied bright eyes, and said, " Of course, of
course.” “ And though some money must vanish in Belgrade
in peculation, since that inevitably happens in every new
country, ” said my husband, “ a great deal must be spent in
legitimate enterprises. There is, after all, Macedonia and Old
Serbia. I have not yet been there, but my wife tells me it has
been revolutionised since the days when it was Turkish, that
she has seen with her own eyes hundreds of miles of good
military roads, whole districts of marshes that have been
drained and now are no longer malarial, and many schools
and hospitals. All that costs money.” “ Yes, there was nothing
down there in those parts,” said Mr. A. without enthusiasm.
" They are nearly barbarians,” said Mrs. X., wrinkling her
nose with distaste. " Have you ever been there ? ” asked my
husband. They shook their heads. Split is two days’ easy
journey from Old Serbia, three days from the heart of Macedonia.
" It is not easy for us to go to such places,” said Mrs. X. ;
“ here in Split we have a certain tradition, we would not be at
home there.”

When we got back to our room in the hotel, my husband
said, " All this is very sad. Men and women have died and
lived for the ideal of Yugoslavia, the South Slav State; and
here are these very charming people chafing with discontent
at the realisation of it. And so far as I can see, however bad
Belgrade may be, they give it no chance to prove its merits.
These people are born and trained rebels. They cry out when
they see a government as if it were a poisonous snake, and
seize a stick to kill it with, and in that they are not being fanciful.
All the governments they have known till now have been, so far
as they are concerned, poisonous snakes. But all the same
that attitude would be a pity, if they happened to meet a govern-
ment for once who was not a poisonous snake.

“ Moreover, I cannot see how these people can ever fit into
a modern state. They are essentially the children of free cities.
Because all these towns, even while they were exploited and
oppressed so far as their external relations w'ere concerned.

2oa BLACK LAMB AND GREY FALCON

possessed charters that gave them great freedom to manage
their internal affairs. Under thi Hungarian crown the towns
enjoyed the same sort of freedom, as of a state within a state,
that the City of London enjoyed under Henry the First. Their
rights were ceaselessly attacked by Venice, but they managed
to defend most of them. They were forced to provide men for
the Venetian army and navies, and their trade was ruined by
the restrictions laid upon it ; but they were always to some
extent masters at their own firesides. They really cannot
conceive of a centralised government at all as otherwise than
an evil : and when they got rid of Austria there must have been
a childish idea at the back of their minds that they had also
got rid of a centralised government, and would return to
medieval conditions. Alas 1 Alas I *'

" Look," I said, “ I am watching three people talking in
the square. They are so very picturesque ; come and see them.”
My husband turned out the light and came and sat beside me
on the window-seat. The square was whitewashed with moon-
light ; the dark shadows took the nineteenth-century Venetian
Gothic architecture and by obscuring the detail and emphasising
the general design made it early, authentic, exquisite. On the
quay ships slept, as alone among inanimate objects ships can
sleep : their lights were dim and dreaming. Between the
flaked trunk of a palm tree and the wild-haired shadow of
its leaves stood three men of the quick and whippy and secret
kind we had seen when we first entered Split, descendants of
those who had lived through the angry centuries the lives of
rats and mice in the walls of Diocletian’s Palace. Sometimes
we could hear their voices raised in lyrical mockery, and some-
times they made gestures that united them on a platform of
heroism and loaded some absent person with ridicule and
chains. “ Yes, they are wonderful,” said my husband. "Though
they probably have no noble ideas, they are noble in the intensity
of their being, and in the persistency with which they try to
identify their standards and the ultimate values of right and
wrong. See how they are pretending that behind them, had one
but the proper eyesight, could be seen the wings of the hierarchy
of angels and the throne itself, and that behind the man they are
despising is primeval ooze and chaos. These people are pro-
foundly different from us. They are not at all sentimental, but
they are extremely poetic. How they examine everything, and

DALMATIA

ao3

analyse it, and form a judgment on it that engenders a supply
of the passion which is their motive power I How I should
hate to govern these people who would not accept the idea of
government and would insist on examining it, but only as a
poet does, from the point of view of his own experience, which'
is to . say that they would reject all sorts of information about
it which they ought to consider if they are going to form a just
opinion about it.”

We watched the three men till a languor showed in their
vehemence. They had laughed so much at the fourth man who
was not there that any further mockery would seem an anti-'
climax. The night was left to the sleeping ships, to the temporary
romantic perfection of the Venetian arcades. " Get into bed,”,
my husband said, ” and I will read you the other story which
Voinovitch says the Dalmatian peasantry tell about the Emperor
Diocletian.” It was the prettier of the two. It represents
Diocletian’s daughter, Valeria, as the victim of her father ; not
as in fact she was, as the subject of a good worldly marriage
that went maniacally wrong, but with a destiny cut fairy-tale
fashion. She had, according to this story, a crowd of suitors,
and of these her father chose a prince whom she could not
tolerate. So she refused obedience, and upon this her father
cast her into one of the dungeons in his palace. But God was
on her side. Once a year invisible hands opened the door of
her prison, and she travelled through the city clad in cloth of
gold, in a shining chariot drawn by winged horses. Her
presence was a benediction, and anybody who could stop the
chariot and embrace her would be happy all the rest of his
life. When Diocletian heard of these visits he sent soldiers to
clear the streets, but it could not be done. The people worshipped
Valeria and would not be driven away. Then Diocletian
decided to kill her. But the walls of her prison melted, md
not all his power could discover her. According to this legend,
she still lives, and once every hundred years she comes back to
her worshippers. It is not known what year of the century she
chooses for her visit, but be that as it may, her visit always
falls at Christmastide. When they are saying the midnight
mass in the Cathedral, a procession of ghosts starts from Salonae
and winds up the road to Split ; and at the end the lovely young
Valeria rides in her golden coach, still able to give lifelong
happiness to all that embrace her. She still, it must be observed,

204 BLACK LAMB AND GREY FALCON

carries on her quarrel with authority. She was at odds with her
pagan father, but she does not attend the Christian mass.

“ See, this story cuts at the root of the idea of power,” said
my husband, " it denies all necessary sanctions to authority.
For power claims to know what life is going to be about and
what prescription to offer, and authority claims to be able to
enforce that prescription. But the Slav knows, as this story
proves, that life, which is to say Valeria, is in essence un-
predictable, that she often produces events for which there is no
apt prescription, and that she can be as slippery as an eel when
wise men attempt to control her ; and they know that it is life,
not power or authority, that gives us joy, and this often when
she is least predictable. Knowing Valeria, they cannot respect
Diocletian ; yet they produce Diocletian, they are Diocletian,
they know perfectly well that power and authority are necessary.”

Boat

On another great white steamer we glided down the coast
to Korchula ; and received at one port, and put ashore at
another, the older of the two German couples with whom we
had travelled from Salzburg to Zagreb. They hastened towards
us uttering cries of welcome, excessively glad to see us because
their holiday had made them excessively glad about everything.
The man no longer looked ill, he seemed bound to his wife
by a common novel satisfaction, as if they had been on their
honeymoon. " It is so good here,” they laughed, " one forgets
all one’s worries." There seemed fresh evidence for the
malignity of the universe in the sight of these Aryans, blossoming
in their temporary exile from Germany, when all over England
and France and America so many Jews were mourning for the
fatherland in a grief visible as jaundice. Another of Dalmatia’s
angry young men watched them coldly as they disembarked. “ I
am a hotel manager at Hvar,” he said. Hvar is a beautiful town,
which lies on an island of the same name. It is noted for the
extraordinary sweetness of its air, which is indeed such as might
be inhaled over a bed of blossoming roses, and by a perversity
rare in the Serbo-Croat tongue it is pronounced “ Whar ”.
” Your friends will presently come to me and demand impossible
terms. They are a curious people the Germans. They seem
content to travel when we would prefer to stay at home. Where

DALMATIA

205

is the pleasure of travelling if you cannot spend freely ? Yet
these Germans come here and have to count every penny and
do not seem at all embarrassed. Now, that is all right if one is
a poor student at Zagreb or Vienna, or is ill and has to go to a
spa. But for a tourist it seems very undignified." It had struck
me before that there are many resemblances between the Slavs
and the Spanish, and this spoke with the very voice of Spain, in
its expression of the purse-pride which comes not from wealth
but from poverty, in its conception of handsome spending as an
inherently good thing, to be indulged in, like truthfulness, even
against one's economic interest.

The angry young man scowled down at the marbled blue
and white water that rushed by our ship. “ I have read in
Jackson's great book on Dalmatia,” said my husband, to soothe
him, " that the inhabitants of the island of Hvar added to their
income by making a sweet wine called prosecco, by distilling
rosemary water, and by making an insecticide from the wild
chrysanthemum. Do they still do all those pleasant things ? ”
" Not to any extent,” answered the young man, his brows
enraged. “Now they cultivate the tourist traffic all summer,
and talk politics all winter. Politics and politics and politics,
I am sick of politics. Why can we never have any peace ?
Why must there always be all this conflict ? ” He was as angry
as the young man who had been angry with the gardener at
Trsat, or the other who had been angry with the cold soup on the
boat to Rab, and it was with them that he felt angry. My
husband attempted to comfort him by telling him that in
England we were suffering from marked deterioration of
political life, and even of national character, because we have
no effectual opposition. “ But here there is nothing but disputes
and disputes and disputes ! ” cried the young man.

There had been standing beside us a middle-aged man in
expensive clothes, who was holding up his hand to hide the left
side of his face. He now pressed forward and made what was
evidently a sharp remark to the angry young hotel manager,
who turned to us and said gloomily, " This man, who is a native
of Hvar, says that I do wrong to speak to you like this, for it
might discourage you from visiting Hvar, and it is certainly the
most beautiful place in the world. I hope I have not done
that ? ” The middle-aged man interrupted in German, " Yes,
you must not take what he says too seriously, for though we in

2o« BLACK LAMB AND GREY FALCON

Hvar are quarrelsome, as all Slavs are (it is the curse that has
been laid upon us) that does not alter its extraordinary beauty.
You must not miss visiting us, indeed you must not.” “ We
cannot do so now,” said my husband, " for we have made definite
plans to go to Korchula to-day. But we will try to stop at Hvar
on our way back." ” Yes, that you must do I For, though I
do not want to be discourteous to a sister island, and indeed all
Dalmatia is glorious country, Korchula has little to show com-
pared to Hvar.” He began to speak of their main street, which
is broad and paved with marble and lined with fifteenth-century
palaces weathered to warm gold ; of the old Venetian arsenal,
that had a dry dock for the galleys below and above a theatre,
the first theatre to be built in the Balkans, which is still just as
it was in the seventeenth century, though the curtains in the
boxes are thin as paper ; of the Franciscan monastery that
stands on a piny headland, with its picture of the Last Supper
which is so marvellous that a Rothschild who had been made
an English duke had tried to buy it from the monks for as many
sovereigns as would cover the canvas ; and of the lovely garden
that had been made on the hill above the town, by a pupil of
our dear Professor at Split, who had wished to emulate his
teacher's achievement in planting the woods on Mount Marian,
which is as pretty a testimony to the value of humanist education
as 1 know. During his story there sometimes came to him
living phrases which made actual the beauty of his home, and
then his hand dropped, no longer feeling it urgent to hide the
port-wine stain that ravaged the left side of his face from
temple to chin ; and when the steamer entered Hvar harbour,
and it was as he had said, he let his hand drop by his side.

When these new friends had left us and we were out in
mid-channel, I picked up a guide-book, but soon laid it down
again, saying to my husband peevishly, ” This guide-book is
written by a member of my sex who is not only imbecile but
bedridden. She is wrong about every place we have been to,
so wildly wrong that it seems probable that not only can she
never have visited any of these particular cities, but that she
can have seen no scenery at all, urban or rural.” " I think,”
said my husband, “ that that is perhaps something of an over-
statement. In any case there is no need for you to keep your
eyes down on any guide-book, you might just as well be looking
at the islands, which are really becoming very beautiful now

DALMATIA

^o^

that they support some trees. But 1 rather suspect that you are
nervous about coming to Korchula and do not want to face it
until the last moment.” " Well, neither I do,” I admitted. “ I
must own that I am seriously nervous about it, because 1 can’t
believe that it had quite the revelatory quality I thought it had
last year. You see, I passed it on my way from Split to Dubrov-
nik last year. I had been asleep on one of the benches on deck,
and I woke suddenly to find that we were lying beside the quay
of a little walled town which was the same creamy-fawn colour
as some mushrooms and some puppies. It covered a low,
rounded peninsula and was surmounted by a church tower,
rising from it like a pistil from a flower ; and its walls girt it
so massively that they might have been thought natural cliffs
if a specially beautiful Lion of St. Mark had not certified them
as works of art.

” Standing on the quayside was a crowd which was more
male in quantity and in quality than we are accustomed to in
Western Europe. There were very few women, and the men
were very handsome with broad shoulders and long legs and
straight hair, and an air of unashamed satisfaction with their
own good looks which one finds only where there is very little
homosexuality. The faces of the crowd were turned away from
the steamer. They were all staring up a street that ran down
the steepness of the town to the quay. Presently there was a
hush, all the window-sashes of the quayside houses were thrown
up, and the crowd shuffled apart to make a clear avenue to the
gangway. Then there came out of the street and along this
alley four men carrying a stretcher on which there lay a girl of
about sixteen. The air was so still that there could be heard the
quick padding of the stretcher-bearers’ feet on the dust, and as
they left the street its mouth filled up with people who stood
gaping after them. This must have been a notorious tragedy
in the town, for the girl was extravagantly beautiful, as beautiful
as Korchula itself, and she was very ill. The shadows on her
face were blue. She was being taken, a sailor said, to a hospital
at Dubrovnik, but I am sure not by her own consent. It was
evident that she had wholly lost the will to live. Her hands lay
lax and open on the magenta coverlet ; and as they turned her
stretcher round to manoeuvre it on to the gangway, she opened
her eyes and looked up at the tall ship in hostility, loathing it
because it was something and she wanted nothingness. Behind

2o8 black lamb and GREY FALCON

her the alley closed, the crowd formed into a solid block and
stared at us as if we were taking with us a sign and a wonder.

“ But the crowd divided again. Another four men hurried
along, bearing this time a chair to which there was strapped an
old woman, so immensely old that she had nothing to do with
the substance of flesh ; she seemed to be compounded of
glittering intelligence and a substance more than bony, re-
sembling the hard parts of a very aged and gnarled lobster.
She looked towards the steamer with an air of unconquerable
appetite. It was something, and therefore better than nothing-
ness, which was what she feared. When the stretcher-bearers
halted in manoeuvring up the gangway she rose up in her chair,
a twisted hieroglyphic expressing the love of life, and uttered
an angry sound she might have used to a mule that was stopping
in midstream.

"Now that was something worth while seeing for itself. But
it also seemed typical of life in Yugoslavia, in the Balkans, be-
cause I had been able to see it. In Western Europe or in
America it would have been highly unlikely that I would see an
old woman or a young girl who were desperately ill, unless they
were my relatives or close friends, and then my interest in them
as individuals would distract my attention from their general
characteristics. I might have guessed, and indeed had done so,
from a great many subtle indications, that the appetite for life
comes in eating, though not by any simple process of taste. Ex-
perience often causes people to pass an adverse judgment on
life, and if they fall ill when they still hold this opinion with the
violence of youth they may die of it, should their personalities
be vehement enough. But if they live long enough they seem
to be governed by a kind of second strength, a secret core of
vitality. There is a Finnish word, sisu, which expresses this
ultimate hidden resource in man which will not be worsted,
which takes charge when courage goes and consciousness is
blackened, which insists on continuing to live no matter what
life is worth. This may mean only that the skeleton wishes
to keep its accustomed garment of flesh, that the eyeball
fears to feel naked without the many-coloured protection of
sight ; but it might mean that the whole of us knows some
argument in favour of life which the mind has not yet appre-
hended. But the point is that here in Yugoslavia I did not have
to poke about among the detritus of commonplace life to And

DALMATIA

209

allusions to this process ; an old woman and a young girl came
out into the street and gave a dramatic rendering of it in the
presence of the people. It is that quality of visibility that makes
the Balkans so specially enchanting, and it was at Korchula
that I had the first intimations of it. So naturally I am alarmed
lest I find the town not so beautiful as I had supposed, and life
in the Balkans precisely the same as everywhere else.”

Korchula I

We found, however, that I was perfectly right about Kor-
chula. “ And let that be enough for you,” said my husband.
" As for your other demands that from now on every day will
be an apocalyptic revelation, I should drop that, if I were you.
You might not like it even if you got it.” We were talking as
we unpacked in the room we had taken in the hotel on the quay,
which is either a converted Venetian palace or built by one
accustomed to palaces frorn birth. A good hotel, it showed that
expiatory cleanliness which is found sometimes in Southern
countries ; from early in the morning till late at night, women
were on their knees in the corridors as if in prayer, scrubbing
and scrubbing, and murmuring to themselves through com-
pressed lips. It was scented with the classic kitchen smell of
the Mare Internum, repellent only to the effete, since it asserts
that precious plants can live on waterless and soilless country,
that even after centuries of strife and misery woman still keeps
the spirit to put a pinch of strong flavour in the cook-pot,
and that it takes the supreme assault of urban conditions to
bring on humanity the curse of a craving for insipidity. Our
fellow-guests were a couple of men as floridly grave as wreathed
Caesars, and their two ladies, both in cloaks, who might have
been travelling for the same romantic and detective reasons as
Donna Anna and Donna Elvira : ornaments of the Sushak wine
trade and their wives.

“ I will lie down and sleep for half an hour,” I said, looking
at the clean coarse sheets, bluish and radiant with prodigious
laundering. ” I will sit here and look at the maps,” said my
husband, who is much given to that masculine form of auto-
hypnosis. But we did neither of these things, for there was a
knock at the door and an announcement that two gentlemen of

aio BLACK LAMB AND GREY FALCON

the town, who had received a letter about us from a friend at
Split, were waiting for us downstairs. We had no idea who
these people might be. My husband imagined mild antiquaries
living among the ruins of Korchula like ageing doves ; I thought
of mildewed Irish squires. We went downstairs and found two
handsome men in early middle-age telling the hotel-keeper’s
wife to be sure to cook us a good Ash for dinner that night, and
give us a certain red wine grown on the island, and it was as
if we looked on a Venetian picture come to life, for the heads
of all were bowed intently towards the argument, the men’s
gestures were wide and made from expanded chests, the woman
promised them obedience with the droop of her whole body.
Of the men one had the great head and full body of a Renaissance
Cardinal, the other had the rejecting crystal gaze of a Sitwell.
They dismissed the hotel-keeper’s wife with a National Gallery
gesture and turned to welcome us. They told us that they would
be pleased to act as our guides in the town, and would start now
if we wished with any destination we pleased. We expressed
our gratitude, and said that we would leave it to them where
we should go. The gentleman with the Sitwell gaze then said :
“ Perhaps you would like to see our new steam bakery.”

Neither myself nor my husband replied. We both sank into
a despondent reverie, wondering why he should think we wanted
to see a new steam bakery. We could only suppose that to him
we were representatives of a Western civilisation that was ob-
sessed with machinery, and perhaps he suspected us of thinking
for that reason that in Dalmatia they ate no bread, or only bread
prepared in a filthy way. Fortunately the one who looked like
a Cardinal blanketed the topic by saying, not accurately, " Ah,
but you will have seen many, many steam bakeries ; you would
like better to see our old churches and palaces.”

We walked along the quay that runs round the point of the
little peninsula, following the walls, and then went up a steep
little street, close-packed with palaces, which thrust out balconies
to one another or were joined by bridges, into the town. We
found it like a honeycomb ; it was dripping with architectural
richness, and it was laid out in an order such as mathematicians
admire. But its spirit was riotous, the honey had fermented
and turned to mead. The men who accompanied us had fine
manners, and only by a phrase or two did they let us gather
that they appreciated how beautiful Korchula must seem to

DALMATIA «ii

us because they had known tlie great towns of the West, Berlin
and Paris, and found them filthy ; but they were not exquisites,
they were robust. They climbed the steep streets at a great
rate, telling us the historic jokes of the town with gusts of
laughter, and apologising for the silence that they shattered by
owning that the city had never repopulated itself after the attack
of plague in the sixteenth century, that had taken five thousand
citizens out of seven thousand. The one that looked like a
Renaissance Cardinal had a peculiarly rich and rolling laugh,
in which there seemed to join amusement at a particular fact
with extreme satisfaction with life in general. Bringing us to
a small square in front of the Cathedral, which was smoothly
paved and therefore had that air of being within the confines
of some noble household, he said, “ Here we have always
walked and talked, and often we have talked too loud. That
is one thing that never changes, our archives are full of the
priests’ complaints that we talked so loud out here that they
could not hear themselves saying mass in the Cathedral.” His
laughter rolled. ” Also we played ball,” said the Sitwell ;
" they complained of that also.” " That leads to the story of
Jacopo Faganeo,” said the Cardinal. “ He was a seventeenth-
century Tuscan priest who was a very great preacher, but a
very good companion too. The Admiral in command of the
Venetian fleet in the Adriatic got him to take a cruise with him,
and when they got here the sailors came ashore, even to the
Admiral and his friends, and we townsmen challenged them to
a game of ball. Nobody was such a good ballplayer as this
priest, so he tucked up his gown and gave a wonderful display,
and we all cheered him. But this scandalised our local priests,
and when Lent came along they refused to let Father Jacopo
preach in the Cathedral, though he was still here with the fleet.
However, soon after our Bishop died, and the Admiral, who had
the Pope’s ear, paid out our priests by getting Father Jacopo
appointed to fill his place. And a very good Bishop he was,
too.”

Then the square must have rung with laughter, with the
laughter of strong men ; but it always knew that there was
darkness as well as light. Above the ball-players rose the
Cathedral, which is girafflsh because of the architect’s conscious-
ness that he must work on a minute site, but which owes its
strangeness of appearance to the troubled intricacy of the

2ia

BLACK LAMB AND GREY FALCON

ornamentation, loaded with tragic speculations of the Slav mind.
For Korchula, like Trogir, is an intensely Slav town. The
degree of the oddity of this ornament can be measured by the
sculpture which projects from the gable above the central door
and rose window. It is a powerfully realistic bust of a richly
decked old woman, not a grotesque, but far too passionate to
be, as some suppose, merely the representation of a fourteenth-
century Queen of Hungary who gave money to the Church.
It has the same Dostoevsky quality as Radovan’s work at
Trogir. Perhaps it was to exorcise this note of metaphysical
fantasy that a nineteenth-century Bishop made a jigsaw puzzle
of the inside of the Cathedral, interchanging the parts and put-
ting in a horrid but matter-of-fact pulpit. But the outside
remains enigmatic in its beauty, partly because it looks across
the square to the roofless ruin of the palace, wild-eyed with
windows whose marble traceries are outlined against the sky,
wild-haired with the foliage of trees that had taken root in the
angles of the upper storey and grew slantwise out of balconies.

“ What is that ? " said the Cardinal. " Regrettably enough
it is the home of my family. We burned it to disinfect it, in the
sixteenth century, after many of our household had died in the
plague, and we have never had the money to rebuild it. But
now 1 will show you another church which you ought to see.”
It was at the foot of one of the steep streets, a church where
the Gothic was melting into the Renaissance, where the archi-
tectural spring was over and the summer was warm and drowsy.
These people could look on this summer-time with much more
satisfaction than we could, for they knew nothing of the winter-
time that had followed it with us, they were unaware of Regent
Street. But they were specially pleased with this church for
another reason which had nothing to do with architecture.
They told us that this church was in the care of a confraternity
and began to explain to us what these confraternities were ;
but when they found out that we already knew, they stopped
and said no more. They did not tell us that they themselves
belonged to this confraternity ; but that was evident. With the
ease of men who were showing strangers round their own
house they took us up a staircase and over a bridge across an
alley into the room where the confraternity kept its records and
its treasures. There we all sat down, and they smiled about
them, gentle and secret smiles. Here they came for the benefit

K.ORCHULA

DALMATIA

*13

of magic, and enjoyed a mystical, uplifting version of the
pleasures of brotherhood. The room was itself an astonish-
ment. It was hung with a score or so of Byzantine ikons, in
the true colours of ikons, that is to say of flame and smoke ;
with the true message of ikons, that is to say of spirit rising from
matter with the precise yet immaterial form of a flame. Of
these they said, smiling at their own history, “ You see, we are
a very pious people — all of us — even our sailors.” These
had, in fact, been looted by good Catholic Korchulans on
expeditions that may sometimes have been certified as naval,
but were sometimes plainly piratical, from Orthodox shrines.
“ People come here and try to buy them,” said the Cardinal
lazily, and laughed into his hand, while his awed eye raked
them and found them valid magic.

“ But some day there will be no question of our being poor
people who can be tempted by foreigners to part with their
goods,” said the Sitwell. “ Nor will we need the tourist traffic
though the money will come in welcome,” said the Cardinal ;
" we shall be able to live exactly like other people, on our
production, when we have repaired the wrongs that the Venetians
and Austrians have done to us. We are not only sailors, we
are shipbuilders. But of course we need more wood. We have
a lot for Dalmatia, more than you will find on the other islands
you have seen, but we still have not enough. Come and see
what we are doing about that.” We went from a gate on the
landward side of the town, down a superb stone staircase, and
we found ourselves in a motor bus full of people who knew our
guides and were known by them, who by some miraculous
adjustment deferred to them and yet behaved as their equals.
It was going to a village on the top of the mountain lying south
of Korchula, and we left it as it got to the foothills, to take a
path into a pinewood. Soon the Cardinal stopped and laid
his hand on the thick trunk of a tall pine and said, " These
trees were planted by my grandfather when he was mayor ” ;
and later, in a further valley he stopped by a slenderer trunk in
a lower, thinner wood, and said, “ These trees were planted by
my father when he was mayor.” And later still in the crease
of a spur that stretched towards an unmedicined barrenness,
dull ochre rock save for the slightly different monotone of the
scrub, we came to a plantation of pine saplings, hardiy hip.
high. " These are the trees 1 have planted, now I am mayor,”

VOL. 1 p

ai4 BLACK LAMB AND GREY FALCON

he said. He stood among them spreading his arms wide above
them, laughing lazily, “ Have I not poor spindly children ?
But they will grow."

On our way back through the denser pinewoods we came to
a terrace, where there were tables and benches for people to sit
and eat on their Sunday walks, and because we were tired,
having started on our journey in the early morning, we asked
if we might rest there for a little. So we sat down on one
side of the table, and they on the other, and they told us what
they hoped to do for the reafforestation of the island and
how the Government had helped them. Then they spoke of
how the Venetians had cut down the woods, and how little the
Austrians had done to replace them ; and as they talked these
men, who were essentially aristocrats, assumed the sullenness
and shabbiness of conspirators. They muttered bitterly into
their fingers, their underlips came forward. Then the Cardinal,
suddenly noble once more, looked up at the sky through the
trees and cried, “ It is better now, it is still difficult, but the
chief offence has been removed ; we are free, and the work goes
well. Are you rested ? Shall we return ? ”

We went all the way back on foot, first by an inlet edged
with prosperous modern villas, belonging to rich Croats, and
then by a road that would have seemed dusty if it had not
passed a monument that flattered my pride. By a very pretty
semicircle of stone seats, conceived in the neo-classical tradition,
was a tablet giving thanks to the English troops who occupied
the island when the French were driven out, and governed it
for two years till the Peace of 1815 handed it over with the rest
of Dalmatia to Austria. We English were then a different
breed. We could build. We could administer. We gave
these islands a democratic institution which they thoroughly
enjoyed and followed the French tradition of efficient public
works by making good roads and harbours. Now we would
build tin huts all over the place, would have been compelled
from Downing Street to kick the natives in the face for fear of
encouraging revolutionary movements which did not in fact
exist, and would have ended up with the evil reputation of
oppressors without any of the fruits of oppression.

Something has changed us. The life we lead does not suit
us. I knew it a few minutes later when we were back in
Korchula, and our guides took us into one of the shipyards on

DALMATIA

ai5

the shore. We went through a yard stacked with wood, that
clean, moral substance, and carpeted with shavings, into a shed
where three men stood contemplating the unfinished hull of a
motor boat. The overlapping timbers were as neat as the
feathers on a bird’s wing, the shape was neat as a bird in flight.
It was a pity that so much beauty should be hidden under the
water. Of the three men in front of it one held up a blueprint
very steadily, another held a rule to the boat and made measure-
ments ; the other watched and spoke with authority. They
were all three beautiful, with thick straight fair hair and bronze
skins and high cheek-bones pulling the flesh up from their
large mouths, with broad chests and long legs springing from
arched feet. These were' men, they could beget children on
women, they could shape certain kinds of materials for purposes
that made them masters of their worlds. I thought of two
kinds of men that the West produces : the cityish kind that
wears spectacles without shame, as if they were the sign of
quality and not a defect, who is overweight and puffy, who can
drive a car but knows no other mastery over material, who
presses buttons and turns switches without comprehending the
result, who makes money when the market goes up and loses it
when the market goes down ; the high-nosed young man, who
is somebody’s secretary or in the Foreign Office, who has a
peevishly amusing voice and is very delicate, who knows a
great deal but far from all there is to be known about French
pictures. I understand why we cannot build, why we cannot
govern, why we bear ourselves without pride in our inter-
national relations. It is not that all Englishmen are like that,
but that too many of them are like that in our most favoured
classes.

It is strange, it is heartrending, to stray into a world where
men are still men and women still women. I felt apprehensive
many times in Korchula, since I can see no indications that the
culture of Dalmatia is going to sweep over the Western world,
and I can see many reasons to fear that Western culture will in
the long run overwhelm Dalmatia. We crossed the road from
the shipyard to call on an elderly woman who lived in a house
which, a bourgeois kind of palace, had belonged to her husband’s
family for four hundred years. We were taken through a finely
vaulted passage to the garden, where we stood under a pergola
of wistaria and looked up at the tracery of the windows which

2i6 black lamb and GREY FALCON

were greatly enriched by the salty weathering of the stone to an
infinity of fine amber and umber tones ; for we had been asked
to wait till she had finished some pious business she was perform-
ing in the private chapel which stood, an arched and pointed
outhouse, among the crowded flowers, close to a niched wall
that sheltered a Triton and a nymph. On the steps of the
chaptel there lay some candles and a match-box and a packet of
washing soda on a sheet of newspaper. For a second I took
this as an indication that the family fortunes were in decline,
but on reflection I wondered what evidence I had that palaces
had ever been neat. All historical memoirs portray a union
between the superb and the sluttish ; and probably tidiness is a
creation of the middle classes, who have had their tendency to
bare and purging Protestantism reinforced by their panic-
stricken acceptance of the germ theory. Boucher’s famous
portrait of Madame Pompadour reveals that even she, who was
the ideal civil servant, kept her personal possessions lying about
on the floor. The homely disorder on the chapel steps was
therefore simply a proof that this establishment was not yet a
museum.

At length the lady of the house came out of the private
chapel, followed by the kitchen smells of piety, not less powerful
and classic than the kitchen smells of our hotel. She was elderly,
though not old ; and it could be seen that she had been very
lovely : and immediately she began to flirt with my husband.
She knew with absolute realism, and had known it, I am sure,
from the first moment when the knowledge became necessary
to her, that she was too old for love. But she knew that a repeti-
tion of the methods by which she had charmed the hearts and
intelligences of the men of her time would give him the same
pleasure an enthusiastic theatre-goer would feel if a famous old
actress rehearsed for him her celebrated performance of Juliet.
Therefore we enjoyed again the gaieties in which her voice and
face and body had combined to promise her admirers that not
only she but all her life was infinitely and unpredictably agree-
able. After there had been a long rally of teasing compliment
and mockery, a bell tolled somewhere in the town, and we all
stopped to listen.

When it ceased there was a silence. My husband breathed
deeply, warmed and satisfied by her aged and now sexless charm
as one might be by a wine so old that all the alcohol had disap-

DALMATIA

217

peared, and said, “ It is wonderfully quiet.” She abandoned
her performance and said to him not sentimentally but with an
almost peevish recollection of past enjo}nnent, as one might say
that in one’s youth one had cared greatly for racing but could
no longer get about to the meetings, " It’s too quiet. I liked
it when there were children about, laughing, and then crying,
and then laughing again. That’s how it ought to be in a house.”
She spoke with complete confidence, as one who expresses an
opinion held by all the world. A house with children is better
than a house without children. That she assumed to be an
axiom, on that she had founded all her life and pride. It was
as if she were a child herself, a fragile child who had escaped
death by a miracle and was boasting of its invulnerability to all
ills. Her life had for the most part been secure because in her
world men had been proud to be fathers, and had marvelled
gratefully at women for being fine-wrought enough to make
the begetting of children an excitement and sturdy enough to
bear them and rear them, and had thought of the mother of
many children as the female equivalent of a rich man. Because
these masculine attitudes had favoured her feminine activities,
her unbroken pride was lovely as the trumpet of a lily. It might
have been different for her if she had been born into a society
where men have either lost their desire for children, or are pre-
vented from gratifying it by poverty or the fear of war. There
she would have been half hated and perhaps more than half, for
her sex. Her womb, which here was her talisman, would have
been a source of danger, which might even strike at the very root
of her primal value, and one day make her husband feel that the
delight he had known with her was not worth the price he must
pay for it. It was terrible that this fate, even if it had failed to
engulf her, was certain to annihilate many of her blood, of her
kind, and that the threat was implicit in many statements that
she made without a shadow of apprehension, as when she told
us that her husband and all his forebears had been sea captains,
and that her sons were still of the tradition and not of it, for they
were agents for great steamship lines.

The Cardinal said to me, ” You are looking very tired. Be-
fore I take you to our house to meet my parents, we will go to a
cafe on the quay, and you can rest.” This seemed to me a
peculiar programme, but it was agreeable enough. As we drank
very good strong coffee the two men talked again of trees : of

2i8 black lamb and GREY FALCON

the possibility of making many motor boats for the new tourist
traffic, of the fishing fleets, of the wrong Italians had done by
seizing the southward island, Lagosta, where the fish are
specially plentiful. " The Slavs all left it when the Treaty
was known," said the Sitwell. “ And they have not been able
to repopulate it with Italians," said the Cardinal, " for they are
idiots, worse than the Austrians. Think of it, they wanted to
colonise the island with Italian fishermen and they renamed it
after an Italian airman who had been killed. Think of doing a
silly thing like that, when you’re dealing with peasants. It’s
such a silly townsman’s trick." His great laughter rolled up
out of him. “ You’re accustomed to deal politically with people
in person,” said my husband. “ That is a funny idea, for us.
Not by the million, through newspapers and the radio, or by
the thousand or hundred in halls, but just in person." The
Cardinal answered modestly, " One does what one can, in order
not to be destroyed. But come and see my father, who is
cleverer at it than I am.”

We went back into the town, and had but one more digres-
sion. The Cardinal whisked us into a courtyard gorgeous with
two balustraded galleries. Because it was an orphanage there
projected between the pillarets the grave puppy-snouts of in-
terested infant Slavs, while above them were the draperies and
blandness of young nuns. The presence of the Cardinal pro-
duced a squealing babble of homage from the orphans, and the
wheeling and bowing courtesies of the nuns recalled the evolu-
tions of angels. The institution wailed its disappointment as
we left, and the Cardinal hurried us round a corner up another
street, into the medievalism of his home.

The courtyard was dark with its own shadows as well as the
dusk, and ghostly with the pale light filtering down from the
still sunlit upper air, through the gutted palace, burned because
of the plague, which formed its fourth side. It looked even
more fantastic than we had thought it in the Cathedral square.
At a window on its ground floor a tree stood like a woman look-
ing into the courtyard, and on the floors above trees, some of
them clothed with blossom which in this uncertain light was
the colour of a grey Persian cat, shot forth from the empty
sockets of vanished rafters in the attitudes of acrobats seeking
the trapeze. The courtyard itself spoke of something even older
than this palace, for it was full of carved stone ; slabs bearing

DALMATIA

219

inscriptions or low reliefs had been let into its walls, and there
set about many statues and fragments of statues, some of
which were Roman. It held as well an infinity of growing
things, of flowers bursting from a lead cistern and a sarco-
phagus, full-fleshed leafy plants and bronze-backed ferns, a
great many of them in little pots hung on lines of string secured
to details of sculpture. We were reminded of what we had
sometimes forgotten during this water-logged spring, that this
was the far South, accustomed to seasons when grass is a recol-
lected miracle and everything that can be coaxed to grow in a
flowerpot is a token and a comfort. On the other side of the
courtyard, facing the ruin, was another palace, also Venetian
Gothic and of the fifteenth century, but intact. Its great door
was open, and showed a dark room and another beyond it that
was lit by the soft white light of a chandelier. Towards this
reserved and even defensive interior the Cardinal now led us.
But I delayed to admire the richness of a design impressed on
the lead cistern, and he told me, " Those are the arms of my
family. But now we do not use such cisterns. We have modem
methods. See, there is a great cistern under this courtyard.”
He brought down his heel on the pavement, making a sharp
ringing noise that sent a little bird whirring out of one of the
plants back to its home in the ruined palace. " Trees and
water,” said the Sitwell, “ they are more precious to us on the
island than gold.” “ We will have all we want of them under
Yugoslavia,” said the Cardinal.

We paused again at the door to handle the great knocker,
which was perhaps by Giovanni Bologna : it was a Neptune
between two rear-uplifted dolphins, magnificent whatever hand
had made it. Inside we found the same vein of magnificence,
though the proportions here, as everywhere else in the city, were
constrained by a want of space ; and the furniture showed the
influence of nineteenth-century Italy and Austria, which was
not without a chignoned and crinolined elegance, but was
coarsened by the thick materiab it employed, the chenille and
rep, the plush and horsehair. In the second room, at a table
under the chandelier, sat a white-haired lady, in her sixties,
dressed in a black velvet gown. From the stateliness of her
gfreeting we understood why her son had taken us to rest at a
caf6 before he brought us into her house. The social life in this
palace was extremely formal, that is to say we were expected

320 BLACK LAMB AND GREY FALCON

to play our part in a display of the social art in its highest sense,
the art of meeting people with whom one may have little or
nothing in common and distilling the greatest possible pleasant-
ness out of the contact without forcing an unreal intimacy. But
it was light as air, weightless swordsmanship. The old lady first
addressed herself to me with a maternal air that was flattering
yet not indecently so, as if the gulf of years between us were
greater than it actually was, but not impossibly great. Then,
like the lady in the sea captain’s palace, she began to address
herself to my husband for the excellent reason that she was a
woman and he was a man. The performance she gave, however,
was probably not modified by time : for the difference in their
social status meant that though all her life she must have taken
for granted that her beauty was a beacon before the eyes of
men, it must have also been her faith that all its sexual implica-
tions, to the remotest, must be private to her immediate family
The sea captain’s widow was certainly chaste as snow, but it
was probable that many men had looked on her and thought it
a pity that she was not their wife ; but this lady was to such an
extreme degree the wife of her husband, the queen of this palace,
that she was withdrawn from even such innocent and respectful
forms of desire. She made, therefore, since her career was to
be a wife and a mother, an exclusively feminine appeal, but it
was remote, ethereal, almost abstract.

When her husband came he proved to be as noble-looking
as she was ; a slender bearded man, with a wolfish alertness
odd in a man of his type. It was like seeing Lord Cecil with
the springy gait of a matador. He apologised at once, in Italian,
for having spoken to his son in Serbo-Croat as he entered the
room. “ I am afraid,” he said, “ we had better converse in
Italian, but I hope you will not take it as a proof of the truth of
the Italian lie that we are Italian on this coast by race and in
language. That is propaganda, and mendacious for that. They
have the impudence to deny us our blood and our speech, and
they have never minded what lies they told. One of them has even
inconvenienced us to the point of having to change our name.
It happened that though we are pure Slavs our name originally
ended in -i, which is not a Slav but an Italian termination, for a
surname, for the reason that in the sixteenth century we chose
to be known by the Christian name of a member of our family
who was a great hero and was killed by the Turks while he was

DALMATIA

221

defending Candia. This circumstance, which was to our glory,
the Italians attempted to turn to our shame, by pretending that
our name proved that we, one of the leading patrician families
of Korchula, were of Italian origin. There is no infamy to
which they will not stoop.”

At that point a decanter of wine and some little cakes were
brought in, and we drank to one another’s health. My husband
explained what a pleasure it was for us to meet them and to see
their historic home. It was strange that when they answered
they seemed not more proud of the stone glories of their palace
than of the little ferns in the pots on the string lines. " Once,”
said the old gentleman, a gleam coming into his eye, " I had
birds as well as plants in my courtyard.” His son began to
laugh, the old lady held her handkerchief to her lips and pouted
and shook her head from side to side. “ Very beautiful they
looked in their cages, and they sang like angels,” went on the
old gentleman severely. “ But my wife did not like having
them there. She did not like it at all. And that is why they are
not there now. Shall I tell the story, Yelitsa ? Shall I tell the
story ? Yes, I had better tell the story. It is something the like
of which they will never have heard ; never will they have heard
of a woman behaving so wickedly.”

We were evidently being admitted to a favourite family joke.
“ Think of it,” he told us with much mock horror, “ we were
entertaining a large company of friends in the courtyard on
Easter morning, as is our custom. Suddenly my ■wife rose and
began to walk from cage to cage, opening all the doors and
saying ‘ Christ is risen, the whole world is rejoicing, rejoice thou
also, bird, and fly away home ! ’ And as it was an assembly, I
could not jump up and chastise her, and our friends sat and
smiled, thinking this was some graceful pious comedy, suitable
for Easter. Did ever a woman play such a trick on her husband ?
I ask you, sir, did your wife ever play such a trick on you ? ”
Her husband, and indeed all of us, gazed at her in adoration
through our laughter, and she shrugged her shoulders and said
comfortably, “ Well, birds in cages, that is something 1 do not
like.”

But in no time we were back in the conflict of Dalmatia
with history. The old gentleman said to us, “ I think you will
enjoy your travels amongst us. But you must make allowances
We are in some respects still barbarous simply because we

22a

BLACK LAMB AND GREY FALCON

spent so much of our time defending the West. We fought the
Turk, and then we fought the Turk, and then we fought the
Turk. For that reason we could not throw off the tyranny of
Venice, so that it was able to use us as a deathbed, to use
our life as a mattress for its decay. The French were better,
but they brought with them their taint of revolution. There
were some sad scenes, here and in Trogir especially, where the
doctrines of Jacobinism caused revolt. But of your countrymen
we have only the happiest recollections. Alas, that the peace
treaty of 1815 should have made the mistake of handing us
over to the Austrian Empire, that unnecessary organisation,
which should have ceased to exist after the destruction of the
Turks, and which survived only to cultivate grossness and
frivolity at the expense of her superior subject races.” “ The
Austrians were the worst oppressors of all that we have known,"
said his son, " For Venice was a dying power during much of
her reign over us, and had not the energy to conquer our spirit.
But Austria felt in excellent health till the beginning of the
Great War, and when she kicked us there was plenty of force
in the boot." ‘ Four generations of us were under Austria,”
said his father, " and always we rebelled against them for that
very reason. Not out of their poverty but out of their wealth
the Austrians would not plant our ruined forests, would not
give us water, and taxed salt, so that our fisheries could not
preserve their fish ; and they hated those of us who were fortunate
but defended the cause of our less fortunate fellow-Slavs.”
“ But it is excessively hard on women," said his wife, addressing
me, “ when the men are for ever busying themselves with
politics."

The old gentleman regarded her tenderly. " My wife
pretends to be frivolous," he said, “ but she is really true to the
courageous tradition of Dalmatian womanhood, which indeed
has been carried on with peculiar glory in Korchula. In 1571,
when we had been abandoned by our cur of a Venetian governor,
who ran away to Zara, and all our men were fighting at sea, a
garrison of women and children successfully defended the town
against the infamous Turkish corsair, Uliz AH, who by the way
was no Turk, but a renegade, simply another of those Italians.
I can say that my wife has been a worthy successor to those
women, for I have never known her flinch before danger.”
" Perhaps I do not,” she said, “ but all the samq^ it has some-

DALMATIA

223

times been very boring." Nevertheless, I couid see his view of
her was the truth. Her standard expression was one I had seen
before, on the faces of women whose husbands had been pre-
war Russian revolutionaries, or Spanish Liberals under Alfonso.
The eyebrows were slightly raised, so that the space between
them was fairly smooth, and the eyelids were lowered : so people
look when they expect at any moment to receive a heavy blow
in the face. But her chin was tilted forward, her lips were
resolutely curved in a smile : she mocked the giver of the blow
before he gave it, and removed her soul to a place where he
could not touch it. " Were you ever frightened ? ” I asked.
“ Again and again I had reason to be, on account of the way
my husband behaved,” she replied. “ But I thank God that
by the time my sons were men we were safe under Yugoslavia.”

" You hear in her words what Yugoslavia means to us
Dalmatians,” said the old gentleman. Then he paused. I
felt he was searching for words to say something that had been
in his mind since he set eyes on us, and that he found intensely
disagreeable. “ I am glad,” he continued, “ that you have
come to see our Yugoslavia. But I think you have come to
see it too soon. It is w'hat I have fought for all my life, and it
is what must be, and, as my wife tells you, it already means a
security such as we have never known before, not since the
beginning of time. But you must remember what Cavour
said : ‘ Now there is an Italy, but we have not yet got Italians.'
It is so with us. We have the machinery of the State in Yugo-
slavia, but we have not yet learned how to work it. We have
many amongst us who do not understand its possibilities, who
are unaware of . . ." — his hands moved in distress — " of
what it should be to us Slavs.” He began to speak in a slow,
braked tone, of the Croatian discontent, and of the Matchek
movement ; and it was clear from his son’s uneasiness and the
muting of his wife’s gaiety, that this household felt itself still
girt by enemies, and that this last encirclement was harder to
bear than any of the others, since these enemies were of their
own blood. These people had remembered they were Slavs
for a thousand years, in spite of the threats of Empire, and
had believed they could not hate their fellow-Slavs. But now
they saw their fellow-Slavs conspiring against Yugoslavia and
giving Italy its opportunity to impose itself again as their
oppressor, it seemed to them that they must hate them, must

*24

BLACK LAMB AND GREY FALCON

exterminate them without pity, as in the past they had ex-
terminated renegades of their race who went over to the Turks.

The old gentleman was saying, " You will find it hard to
believe, but there are those amongst us who are so misguided
as to wish to alienate the Croats from our fellow-Slavs, the
Serbs ; and indeed there are very great differences between us
and the Serbs, differences of manners due to the unfortunate
circumstance that they suffered what we did not, centuries of
enslavement by the Turks. But they are not only brothers,
they have given us enormous gifts. 1 remember that many
years ago your admirable Professor Seton-Watson came to
stay with me here, and he said to me, ' You are insane to think
of complete Slav independence, all you can hope for is full
rights for the Slavs as citizens within the Austro-Hungarian
Empire ; it is far too strong for any of the Slav powers.’ But
then he came back early in 1914, just after Serbia had beaten
Turkey in the Balkan war, and he said, ' Now it is different.
When I see what the Serbs have done against Turkey, I am not
at all sure that the Serbs and the Czechs and you Croats will
not beat the Austro-Hungarian Army.’ He spoke truly. It
was the triumph of the Serbs that gave us hope. I find it there-
fore disgusting that over a slight affair of manners people should
disdain their liberators.” He spoke as a clear-cut man of action,
used to making clear-cut decisions, used to arriving at clear-
cut computations which are necessary before a compromise can
be arranged. Not in a thousand years would he understand the
Croatian world, which had been diluted by the German poison,
which was a platform of clouds for drifting personalities, Slav
in essence but vague in substance, unclimactic in process.

“ And this Matchek movement,” cried the old gentleman, “ is
Bolshevist ! It is Communist ! What is all this nonsense about
the necessity for a social revolution ? If there is work the work
people earn wages and benefit. What other economic problem
is there beyond this ? If we can build up our fisheries and our
shipbuilding on Korchula, then our islanders will have plenty
of money and have all they want. What more is there to say
about it ? ” He looked at us with the eye of an old eagle that
is keeping up its authority, yet fears that he may be wrong.
He knew that what he was saying was not quite right, but he
did not know in what it was wrong. We thought that his pre-
dicament was due to his age, but when we looked at his son

DALMATIA

225

we found precisely the same expression on his face. He said,
without his usual authority, “ This is all the work of agitators,
such as Mussolini used to be.'* He probably alluded to the
fact that when Mussolini was a Socialist he once organised a
dock strike at Split. The experience of these people was very
rich.

But in one respect it was very poor. They laboured, I saw,
under many advantages — innate gifts, a traditional discipline
which had been so ferociously applied through the centuries to
cowards -and traitors that courage and loyalty now seemed theirs
of birthright, a devotion to public interest which made them
almost as sacred as priests. But they laboured under one dis-
advantage. The ideas of the French Revolution had never been
talked out in this part of the world. A touch of the Jacobin
fever had reached Dalmatia when it was still under Venice,
and had been drastically cured, first by the Venetians and later
by the French. The year 1848 had brought a revival of re-
volutionary ideas to all Europe, but not to Dalmatia and Croatia,
because the Hungarian uprising had taken an anti-Slav turn
under Kossuth, and the Croats were obliged to offend their
racial interests by fighting for the Hapsburgs and reaction.
Nobody in these parts, therefore, had ever discussed the pos-
sibility that the doctrine of Liberty, Equality and Fraternity
might be an admirable prescription to maintain the peace in an
expanding industrial civilisation. They had no means of under-
standing those believers in their doctrine who have discovered
that it is impossible to guarantee liberty, equality or fraternity
to every member of a community while some members hold
economic power over others, and who now demand a redistribu-
tion of wealth. This family took all the pother for a modern
version of something which as Korchulan patricians they under-
stood quite well : a plebeian revolt. Without a qualm they
would resist it, for they knew what the people really wanted,
and were doing their best to get it for them as fast as possible.
Water, that was what they needed, and trees. Innocent in their
misapprehension, bright with charity and public spirit, but
puzzled by the noise of some distant riot for which their intimate
knowledge of the civic affairs had not prepared them, the
father and mother and son sat in the white circle under the
chandelier, the darkness in the courtyard beyond now entirely
night.

226

BLACK LAMB AND GREY FALCON

Korchtda II

I woke early next morning, and heard Ellen Terry speaking
as she had spoken at the Theatre Royal, Edinburgh, when I
was a little girl. Her voice had lifted imperiously to cry,
" Kill Claudio 1 " a behest not at all offensive since it was
essentially just, yet raising certain problems. It was good that
somebody should speak up for simple dealing with evil, although
no one who knew all, who had comprehended the whole mystery
of good and evil, would say it like that. There was perhaps
something about the family I had visited last night which had
recalled the speaking of those words. I fell asleep again, and
was reawakened by the sound of singing, a little rough and
wolfish for mere gaiety. When I went to the window there
was a crowd of young men standing on the quay, each carry-
ing a bundle. “ They must be conscripts," said my husband,
" waiting for a steamer to take them to the mainland.” “ Yes,”
I said, " this is the time of year when they start their training.
And look, they all look oddly shabby for such clean young men.
They are all brisked up to look their best, but at the same time
they’ve all come in their old clothes and left their new ones at
home.” " Let us wash and dress very quickly, and go down
and have a look at them as they go on board.”

As we came out of the front door of the hotel, our cups of
coffee in our hands, a white steamer came round the peninsula,
lovely as a lady and drunk as a lord. She listed deeply land-
wards, because she already carried a freight of young men,
and they had all run to the side to have a look at Korchula.
" It is the steamer come to take the conscripts away,” said a
man standing beside us, in English which had been learned in
America. " Yes,” we said. " They go to do their military
service now on the mainland,” he continued. ‘‘ Yes,” we said.
” They go now to do their military service for Yugoslavia,” he
said, “ but they are good Dalmatians, they are good Croats.
Those songs you have heard them singing lire all against the
Government.” He wore a fixed, almost absent-minded smile
that represented derision grown second-nature, having long
forgotten its first or any other reason. I remembered something
Constantine once told me. “ We Slavs love the terrible,” he
said, “ and it happens that when we feel deeply terrible ex-

DALMATIA

227

pressions come on our faces. As we love the terrible we keep
them there, and they become grins, grimaces, masks that mean
nothing. That is one of the things that has happened among
the Bolsheviks. Revolution has become a rictus." It has
perhaps gone wrong here also.

As the ship drew nearer we heard that the young men
leaning over the rail were singing just these same angrily
hopeful songs as the young men on the quay, and by the time
she came alongside the quay they were joined in one song. Some
of those on the ship could not wait to land until the gang-plank
was lowered, and after shouting for the crowd below to fall
back, they jumped from the rails to the quay, their bodies full
of a goatish vigour, their faces calm and stubborn and with-
drawn. They ran past us and came back in an instant carrying
yard-long loaves under their arms, and stood quietly, rapt in
the exaltation of having started on a new adventure, behind
the young men of Korchula, who were standing more restlessly,
the new adventure not having begun for them, and the distress
of their families being a disagreeable distraction. Unifying these
two groups was this dark overhanging cloud of discontented
song. We went inside the hotel and buttered ourselves second
rolls, and when we returned the boat had taken aboard its load
and started out to sea. She was some hundreds of yards from
the shore, more drunken than ever, listing still deeper with her
increased freight, which was singing now very loudly and crowd-
ing to the rails to wave to the residue of their grieving kin,
who were now moving along the quay to the round towers
at the end of the peninsula so that they would be able to see
her again as she left the bay and went out into the main channel ;
they walked crabwise, with their heads turned sideways, so that
they should not miss one second’s sight of their beloveds. They
were obviously much moved by that obscure agony of the
viscera rather than of the mind or even of the heart, which
afflicts the human being when its young goes from it over water,
which Saint Augustine described for ever in his Confessions, in
his description of how his mother Monica grieved when he took
sail from Africa to Italy. Presently the ship was gone, and the
crowd came back, all walking very quickly and looking down-
wards and wiping their noses.

We found standing beside us the Cardinal, the Sitwell and a
handsome lady who was the Sitwell’s wife. It was a pity so

228 BLACK LAMB AND GREY FALCON

far as we were concerned, but it threw an interesting light on
the claims of Italy to Dalmatia, and the real orientation of
Dalmatia, that this lady spoke no languages but Serbo-Croatian
and Russian, which she had acquired from a teacher who had
been at the Tsarina’s boarding school in Montenegro. They
took us down to a motor boat by the quay, and we went out
through a blue and white and windy morning for a trip about
the island. Now the city of Korchula was a goldsmith’s toy,
a tortoise made of precious metals, sitting on its peninsula as
on a show-stand, and we were chugging past a suburb of villas,
pink and white like sugar almonds. We passed a headland or
two and came to a bay wide enough to be noble, and narrow
enough to be owned. On its lip was moor and rock, and behind
them olive terraces and almond orchards rose to scrub and
bleakness. A track ran up to a high village in a crevice of this
bleakness, and the Cardinal, laughing, told us that its in-
habitants plagued the central and the local authorities for a
better road down to this bay. " And we say, ‘ But why ? You
have a perfectly good road dowm to Korchula ! ’ And they say,

‘ But Korchula is not our port. This bay should be our port.’
So you see the little world is the same as the big world, and both
are silly.”

In that, and a further bay, we made the boat linger. The
green water glittered clean as ice, but gentle. ” Could we buy
some land ? ” we asked. " Could we build a villa ? ” It would
be a folly. To get there from London would take two nights
and two days by rail and steamer, and I do not suppose that
either of us would ever be on easy terms with a language we
had learned so late. But the sweet wildness of these bays, and
the air rich with sun-baked salt and the scent of the scrub,
and the view of the small perfect city, made this one of the
places where the setting for the drama is drama enough. “ Yes,
you could buy it, yes, you could build,” they said. “ But one
thing,” said the Cardinal, rather than deceive a stranger, " one
thing you will not have in abundance. That is water. But
then you could afford to build yourself a big cistern, and it
always rains here in w'inter. That is the trouble, things work
in a circle. People here need water if they are to make money.
But because they have no money they cannot build cisterns to
store w’ater. So they cannot make any more money. All that,
however, we shall settle in time."

DALMATIA

229

As we set off to the opposite coast, which looked like an
island but was the peninsula of Pelyesatch, the Korchulans
still talked of water. We had a great disappointment,” said
the Sitwell. " Over at Pelyesatch there is a spring of which
the inhabitants have no very great need, and it was thought
that we could raise enough money to build a pipe-line across
this channel to our island. But alas I we discovered at the
last moment that from time to time, and especially during
droughts, when we would need it most, the spring ran salt.”
” You from England,” said the Cardinal, " can have no notion
of how disappointed we were. Still, we must not complain.
When the worst comes to the worst, they send us a ship with a
cargo of water down from Split.”

As we drew nearer the shore the water under the keel was
pale emerald, where the diving sunlight had found sand. We
landed on a little stone quay, where fishermen in a boat with
a rust-coloured sail called greetings to our friends, as in the
Middle Ages plebeians who were yet free men would have
greeted nobles, when the dispensation was working well. We
stepped out and walked along the coast by a line of small
houses and gardens and the Cardinal said, ” This is the village
where all retired sea captains come to live if they can possibly
manage it.” Sea captains are sensible. There was nothing
that was not right in this village. There was nothing there
which was not quietly guided to perfection by a powerful
tradition. Every house was beautiful, and every garden. And
they were small, they were not the results of lavish expenditure ;
and most of them were new, they were not legacies from a
deceased perfection.

Even the quite business-like post-office had an air of lovely
decorum. Its path led through a garden which practised a
modest and miniature kind of formality, to a small house built
of this Dalmatian stone which is homely as cheese and splendid
as marble. Within a cool and clean passage, finely vaulted, was
blocked by a high stand of painted iron, proper in every twist
of its design, in which were posed flowers that needed special
gentleness. A woman, well-mannered and remote, came from
the back of the house and talked gravely of some local matter
with the Cardinal, while she plucked me a nosegay with precise
taste. The people who went by on the road looked like her, the
houses we had passed had all been like this. Here man was at

VOL. 1 Q

230 BLACK LAMB AND GRSY FALCON

ease, he had mastered one part of the business of living so veil
that it was second nature to him. If we bought that bay over
on Korchula we would not know what kind of a house to build,
we would have to take an infinite amount of thought, and our
success would be a matter of hit and miss ; and we would have
to think of what we wanted our garden to look like. But these
people’s culture instructed them exactly how best they might
live where they must live.

We went next into the garden of a larger and a grander
house, which was empty, and from an orange tree the Cardinal
broke me a branch laden with both fruit and blossom. “ It
belongs,” he said, looking up at its desolation, " to some Croats,
who, poor people, bought it to turn into a hotel without reflecting
that they had no money to rebuild it or run it.” Though he was
so practical, he spoke of this not unimportant negligence as if
it were not blameworthy, as if they had just been afflicted with
this lapse of memory as they might with measles or loss of sight.
I carried my sceptre of oranges along till we came to a church,
a little church, the least of churches, that was dwarfed by a
cypress which was a third of its breadth and a quarter taller,
and itself was no king of trees. Small as it was, this church was
recognisably of a superb tradition, and had big brothers that
were cathedrals. We stood on the lawn admiring its tiny
grandeur, while the Cardinal, who knew that all things were
permitted to him everywhere, went to the bell-tower, which
stood separate, and pulled the rope. While its deep note still
was a pulse in the air, the Cardinal pointed to the road behind
us and said, ” Look I There is something you will not often
see nowadays.”

An old gentleman was having his walk, neat and clean, with
white mutton-chop whiskers joining the moustaches that ran
right across his shining pink face, wearing a short coat and
sailorly trousers. He had the air of being a forthright and
sensible person, but time was disguising him, for he had checked
himself on seeing us from carrying on a conversation with
certain phantoms, and age forced him to walk drunkenly.
” Zdravo ! ” said the Cardinal, as is the way of Slavs when
they meet. ” Flourish I ” it means. '* Zdravo,” the old man
answered, as from the other side of an abyss. " I told you that
all retired sea captains wanted to live here. There is one of
them ; and you may see from his Franz Josef whiskers that he

DALMATIA

231

was in the Austrian Navy. I think those side-whiskers on such
an old man are the only things coming from Vienna that I
really like.” We watched the old man totter on his way, and
as he forgot us, he resummoned his phantom friends and con-
tinued their argument. “ God pity us," said the Cardinal,
” Yugoslavia must be, but it is almost certain that because of
it there is here and there a good soul who feels like a lost
dog.”

The boat took us, for a time round the pale emerald waters
close to the beach within a stone’s-throw of these houses and
gardens that would have been theatrical in their perfection if
they had not been austere. Then we drew further out and saw
how above this hem of fertility round the shore olive groves and
almond orchards rose in terraces to bluffs naked except for a
little scrub, on which rested a plateau with more olives and
almonds and a scattered blackness of cypresses and some villages
and churches ; and above this were the naked peaks, reflecting
the noonlight like a mirror. Then fertility died out. Under
the bluffs there was now a slope of scrub that sent out a perfume
which I could smell in spite of the flowering orange branch upon
my knee ; and then a thick forest of cypresses, which for all
their darkness and chastity of form presented that extravagant
appearance that belongs to a profusion of anything that is usually
scarce. Then the mountains dropped to a bay, a shoulder of
sheer rock, and on the flat shore lay a pleasant town. " This
is Orebitch,” said the Cardinal. "Look, there is painted all
along the pier, ‘ Hail and welcome to the Adriatic It is the
greeting the town made to our jjoor King Alexander when he
sailed up this coast on his way to his death at Marseilles. He
had no time to stop there, so they paid their respects in this
way.” We murmured our interest and kept our eyes on that
inscription, and not on the other which some daring young man
had scratched giant-high on the shoulder of rock above. "Zhive
Matchek,” it read. Long live Matchek, the enemy of Yugo-
slavia, the emblem of the economic struggle which awakened
no sympathy among our friends, though they could feel kindly
for Croats who bought hotels without the money to run them,
and for old Austrian naval officers, simply because nothing in
their experience had prepared them for it.

Across the channel Korchula’s lovely form was minute and
mellow gold. We started towards it over a sea that was now

BLACK LAMB AND GREY FALCON

*3*

brighter emerald, among islets which were scattered pieces of
Scotland, rugged points of rock and moor with the large air of
the Grampians though hardly paddock-wide. Our boat could
slip within a foot or two of them, so deep and calm were the
waters. Here was one much visited for the seagulls’ eggs. As
we chugged past the gulls rose and crossed and recrossed the
sky above us, wailing against us who were their Turks, their
pirates. At another islet a boat was hauled up on a yard of
shingle and three fishermen lay sleeping among the scrub,
bottles and empty baskets beside them. One heard our boat
and lifted his head. His preoccupied eyes, blinking before the
noon, found and recognised us ; he raised his hand and said
" Zdravo I ” in an absent voice, and sank back with an air of
returning to a more real world. The other two did not wake,
but stirred defensively, as if guarding their own sleep.

“ They will have been fishing since dawn, the good lads,”
said the Sitwell. We passed another and more barren islet
which rose to a flat top, not broad. Perhaps five fishermen
might have taken their midday rest there. " Here a famous
treaty in our history was signed,” said the Cardinal. Men had
scrambled out of boats on to this stony turret, barbarian and
jewelled, for this coast was as much addicted to precious stones
as to violence. Merchants went from island to island, hawking
pearls and emeralds among the nobles, and the number of
jewellers in the towns was extraordinary. In Korchula there
were at one time thirty-two. After a few more such islets we
came on a larger island, Badia, which illustrated the enigmatic
quality of Dalmatian life. A monastery stands among its pine-
woods, where there had been one for nearly a thousand years,
though not the same one. Again and again men have gone there
to live the contemplative life, and because it lies by the shore on
a flatness hard to defend, and is distant from both Korchula and
the mainland, pirates have murdered and looted their altars;
and always other monks have come in their stead, to be murdered
and looted in their turn. This series of pious tragedies con-
tinued until the middle of the nineteenth century. This might
be comprehensible, were the place the site of some holy event,
or were it some desert supremely appropriate to renunciation
of the world and union with the supernatural. But Badia has
no story other than this curious mutual persistence of monks and
pirates, and the monastery lies as comfortably and unspiritually

DALMATIA

*33

among its gardens as a Sussex manor-house. The history
presents an exactly matched sadism and masochism, equally
insane in the pursuit of what it finds its perverse pleasure, and
nothing more.

Nuns, finding themselves as unwholesomely situated, would
have gone home. That I thought before we landed, and I knew
it afterwards. For we walked through the well-husbanded
gardens, and round the cloisters, which are a mixture of Venetian
Gothic and early Renaissance and conventional classic, yet are
handled with such genius that they please as if they were of
the purest style, and into the church, where the golden stone
of the country makes splendour out of a plainish design. There,
though this was a Franciscan monastery and a boys' school, a
very pretty nun was scrubbing the floor in front of the altar.
She sat back on her pleasing litde haunches and smiled with
proprietary pride while we were shown a wooden cross, brought
to Korchula by refugees who had fled here after the Turks had
beaten Balkan Christendom at the battle of Kossovo, which
showed on each side a realistic Christ in agony, the one mani-
festly dead, the other manifestly still living. So might a farmer’s
daughter smile when strangers came to her father’s byres to
marvel at a two-headed calf. Had she been in charge of the
religious establishment when pirates threatened, this and all
other holy objects would have been gathered up and stuffed
with simple cunning into loads of hay or cabbages and rowed
back to safety.

She was sensible. There is nothing precious about this
Dalmatian civilisation. It rests on a basis of good peasant sense.
We left Badia and chugged back to the island of Korchula, to a
bay of hills terraced with vineyards and set with fortress-like
farms, stocky among their fig and mulberry trees. The roads
that joined them ran between thick walls, up great ramps and
steps that not all the armies of the world and marching a year
could tread down ; wine alwajrs converts those who deal in it
to the belief that all should be made for time to gather up into
an ultimate perfection. “ On that headland yonder,” said the
Cardinal, pointing to a moory headland, ” was found the tablet
which told us who we Korchulans are. An archaeologist work-
ing there last century found an inscription which gave the names
of five hundred Greek colonists who setded there in the third
century before Christ." “ Was it not a hundred ? ’’ asked the

234 BLACK LAMB AND GREY FALCON

Sitwell. “ That is not important,” said the Cardinal, " what
matters is that they were foeek. It means that here is a part
of ancient Greece which never was conquered by the Turk,
which was never conquered at all in any way that could conquer
ancient Greece. For in spite of Hungary and Venice and
Austria we have, as you may have noticed, kept ourselves to
ourselves.” I listened, smiling as at a boast, and then forgot
to smile. What was ancient Greece that all the swains adore
her ? A morning freshness of the body and soul, that will have
none of the dust ; so it might be said. That was not incongruous
with much we had seen since we first took to the water that
morning. The claim was perhaps relevant to the extreme
propriety of the sea captain's village, the gracefulness of the
olive orchards and the almond orchards that had been forced
on the mountains, the town of Orebice and its clear, virile
inscription and counter-inscription, the fisherman on the islet,
the peasant nun scrubbing the golden stone in front of the altar
at Badia, the vineyards and their sturdy forts and redoubts. It
was certainly completely in harmony, that claim, with this last
island that we visited.

“ This you must see,” the Sitwell had said ; “ there is a
great quarry there, which has given the stone for some of the
most beautiful buildings on our coast. They say the Rector’s
Palace at Dubrovnik came from here.” We slid by so near that
we could see the weed floating from its rocks, and looked at
something that surely could not be a quarry town. There are
certain ugly paradoxes that hold good in almost every society ;
for example, the people who satisfy humanity’s most urgent
need and grow its food are ill-paid and enjoy little honour.
Another is the scurvy treatment of those who hew from the earth
its stone, which not only gives shelter but compels those who
use it towards decorum ; for even the worst architect finds
difficulty in committing certain meannesses of design when he
is working with stone, and it will help him to fulfil whatever
magnificent intentions he may conceive. But in most quarry
villages privation can be seen gaining on man like a hungry
shark ; and in France I have visited one where the workers
lived in lightless and waterless holes their hands had broken in
the walls of a medieval castle. But here it was not so. The
island was like a temple, the village we saw before us was like
an altar in a temple.

DALMATIA

335

The village lay on the shore under a long low hill, riven with
quarries and planted with some cypresses. The houses were
built in proper shapes that would resist the winter gales but
were not grim, that did not deny the existence of spring and
summer, in stone that was the colour of edible things, of pale
honey, of pie-crust, of certain kinds of melon. Flowers did not
merely grow here, they were grown. Nasturtiums printed a
gold and scarlet pattern on a wall under a window, vine-
leaves made an awning over a table outside a house where an
open door showed a symmetry of stacked barrels. Some men
walked down the street, two and then another group of three.
Because they knew our friends and thought them worthy, they
raised their hands in salutation, then thought no more of us,
receding into their own lives as the fisherman had receded into
his sleep. Four children, playing with a goat and its kid,
looked backwards over their shoulders for a second, and went
back to their play. A woman scrubbing a table in her garden
straightened her arm and rested on it, wondering who we might
be, and when she had rested enough put aside her curiosity and
went on with her work. The houses and the people made a
picture of a way of life different from what we know in the West,
and not inferior.

My power to convey it is limited ; a man cannot describe
the life of a fish, a fish cannot describe the life of a man. It
would be some guide to ask myself what I would have found on
the island if we had not been water-strolling past it on our way
back to familiarity but had been cast on it for ever. I would
not find literacy, God knows. Nearly one-half the population
in Yugoslavia cannot read or write, and I think I know in
which half these men and women would find themselves. From
the extreme aesthetic sensibility shown in the simple archi-
tecture of their houses and the planting of their flowers it could
be seen that they had not blunted their eyes on print. Nor
would I find clemency. This was no sugar-sweet Island of the
Blest ; the eyes of these men and women could be cold as stone
if they found one not to be valuable, if they felt the need to be
cruel they would give way to it, as they would give way to the
need to eat or drink or evacuate. Against what I should lack
on this island I should count great pleasure at seeing human
beings move about with the propriety of animals, with their
muscular ease and their lack of compunction. There was to

236 BLACK LAMB AND GREY FALCON

be included in the propriety the gift, found in the lovelier animals,
of keeping clean the pelt and the lair. At a close gaze it could
be seen that not in this quarry village either had the damnably
incongruous poverty been abolished, but all was clean, all was
neat. But not animal was the tranquillity of these people.
They had found some way to moderate the flow of life so that it
did not run to waste, and there was neither excess nor famine,
but a prolongation of delight. At the end of the village a
fisherman sat on a rock with his nets and a lobster-pot at his
feet, his head bent as he worked with a knife on one of his tools.
From the deftness of his movements it could be seen that he
must have performed this action hundreds of times, yet his body
was happy and elastic with interest, as if this were the first time.
It was so with all things on this island. The place had been a
quarry for over a thousand years : it was as if new-built. The
hour was past noon ; it was as undimmed as dawn. Some of
the men, and a woman who was sitting between her flowers
on the doorstep, were far gone in years, but there was no stale-
ness in them.

On the last rock of the island, a yard or so from the shore,
stood a boy, the reflected ripple of the water a bright trembling
line across his naked chest. He raised his eyes to us, smiled,
waved his hand, and receded, receded as they all did, to their
inner riches. There passed through my mind a sentence from
Humfry Payne’s book on Archaic Marble Sculpture in the
Acropolis, which, when I verified it, I found to run : “ Most
archaic Attic heads, however their personality, have the same
vivid look — a look expressive of nothing so much as the
plain fact of their own animate existence. Of an animate
existence lifted up, freed from grossness and decay, by some
action taken by the mind, which the rest of the world cannot
practice." I said to the Cardinal, “ You have a way of living
here that is special, that is particular to you, that must be
defended at all costs.” He answered in a deprecating tone,
" I think so.” I persisted. " I do not mean just your archi-
tecture and your tradition of letters, I mean the W'ay the people
live.” He answered, “ It is just that. It is our people, the way
we live.” We were running quicker now, past the monastery
among its pinewoods, past the headland where the Greek tablet
was found, and could see the town of Korchula before us. “ I
should like,” said the Cardinal, “ you to come back and learn to

DALMATIA

»37

know our peasants. This business of politics spoils us in the
towns, but somebody has to do it.”

It was at this point, when the town had become a matter of
identifiable streets, that the motor boat stopped and began to
spin round. The Sitwell said, " We in Korchula are the
descendants of a hundred or perhaps of five hundred Greeks,
‘and we have defended the West against the Turks, ihd maybe
Marco Polo was one of our fellow-countrymen, but all the same
our motor boats sometimes break down.” The boatman made
tinkering sounds in the bowels of the boat, while the green
waters showed their strength and drew us out to the wind-crisped
channel. " They will miss the steamer to Dubrovnik,” said the
Sitwell. " Is it of importance,” asked the Cardinal, “ that you
should be at Dubrovnik to-day ? ” ” Yes,” said my husband.
The Cardinal stood up and made a funnel of his hands and
hallooed to a rowing-boat that was dawdling in the bright light
on the water to our south. Nothing happened, and the Cardinal
clicked his tongue against his teeth, and said, " That family
has always been slow in the uptake. Always.” It would have
been amusing to ascertain what he meant by always, probably
several centuries. But he continued to halloo, and presently
the boat moved towards us. It proved to contain two young
persons evidently but lately preoccupied with their own emotions :
a girl whose hair was some shades lighter than her bronze skin
but of the same tint, and a boy who seemed to have been
brought back a thousand miles by the Cardinal’s cry, though
once he knew what was wanted and we had stepped from our
boat to his, he bent to his oars with steady vigour, his brows
joined in resolution. The girl, who was sucking the stem of a
flower, derived a still contentment from the sight of his prowess,
which indeed did not seem to surprise her. Behind us, across
a widening space of shining milk-white water, the motor boat
we had just left had now become a stately national monument,
because the Cardinal remained standing upright, looking down
on the boatman. He was quite at ease, since he had got us off
to our boat, but he was watching this man, not to reprove him
for any fault but to judge his quality. From a distance he
resembled one of those stout marble columns in the squares of
medieval cities from which the city standard used to be flown.

238

BLACK LAMB AND GREY FALCON

Dubrovnik (Ragusa) I

" Let us wire to Constantine and ask him to meet us earlier
in Sarajevo,” I said, lying on the bed in our hotel room, " I
can’t bear Dubrovnik.” “ Perhaps you would have liked it
better if we had been able to get into one of the hotels nearer
the town," said my husband. “ Indeed I would not,” I said.
" I stayed in one of those hotels for a night last year. They
are filled with people who either are on their honeymoon or
never had one. And at dinner I looked about me at the tables
and saw everywhere half-empty bottles of wine with room-
numbers scrawled on the labels, which I think one of the dreari-
est sights in the world.” “ Yes, indeed,” said my husband,
“ it seems to me alwa3rs when I see them that there has been
disobedience of Gottfried Keller’s injunction ‘ Lass die Augen
fassen, was die Wimper halt von dem goldnen Ueberfluss der
Welt ’, ' Let the eyes hold what the eyelids can contain from
the golden overflow of the world.’ But you might have liked it
better if we were nearer the town." " No,” I said, " nothing
could be lovelier than this.”

We were staying in a hotel down by the harbour of Gruzh,
which is two or three miles out of Dubrovnik or Ragusa, as it
used to be called until it became part of Yugoslavia. The
name was changed although it is pure Illyrian, because it
sounded Italian : not, perhaps, a very good reason. Under the
windows were the rigging and funnels of the harbour, and
beyond the crowded waters was a hillside covered with villas,
which lie among their gardens with an effect of richness not quite
explicable by their architecture. The landscape is in fact a
palimpsest. This was a suburb of Dubrovnik where the nobles
had their summer palaces, buildings in the Venetian Gothic
style furnished with treasures from the West and the East,
surrounded by terraced flower-gardens and groves and orchards,
as lovely as Fiesole or Vallombrosa, for here the Dalmatian coast
utterly loses the barrenness which the traveller from the North
might have thought its essential quality. These palaces were
destroyed in the Napoleonic wars, looted and then burned ; and
on their foundations, in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries,
have been built agreeable but undistinguished villas. But that
is not the only confusion left by history on the view. The

DALMATIA

*39

rounded slope immediately above the harbour is covered by an
immense honey-coloured villa, with arcades and terraces and
balconies hung with wistaria, and tier upon tier of orange trees
and cypresses and chestnuts and olives and palms rising to the
crest. It makes the claim of solidity that all Austrian archi-
tecture made, but it should have been put up in stucco, like our
follies at Bath and Twickenham ; for it was built for the Em-
press Elizabeth, who, of course, in her restlessness and Hapsburg
terror of the Slavs, went there only once or twice for a few days.

“ I like this,” I said, “ as well as anything in Dubrovnik.”
“ That can't be true,” said my husband, " for Dubrovnik is
exquisite, perhaps the most exquisite town I have ever seen.”
“ Yes,” I said, “ but all the same I don’t like it, I find it a unique
experiment on the part of the Slav, tmique in its nature and
unique in its success, and I do not like it. It reminds me of the
worst of England." “ Yes,” said my husband, “ I see that,
when one thinks of its history. But let us give it credit for what
it looks like, and that too is unique.” He was right indeed, for
it is as precious as Venice, and deserves comparison with the
Venice of Carpaccio and Bellini, though not of Titian and Tin-
toretto. It should be visited for the first time when the twilight
is about to fall, when it is already dusk under the tall trees that
make an avenue to the city walls, though the day is only blanched
in the open spaces, on the bridge that runs across the moat to the
gate. There, on the threshold, one is arrested by another example
of the complexity of history. Over the gate is a bas-relief by
Mestrovitch, a figure of a king on a horse, which is a memorial
to and a stylised representation of King Peter of Serbia, the
father of the assassinated King Alexander, he who succeeded to
the throne after the assassination of Draga and her husband.
It is an admirable piece of work. It would surprise those who
knew Mestrovitch's work only from internationd exhibitions to
see how good it can be when it is produced under nationalist
inspiration for a local setting. This relief expresses to perfection
the ideal ruler of a peasant state. Its stylisation makes, indeed,
some reference to the legendary King Marko, who is the hero
of all Serbian peasants. This king could g^oom the horse he
rides on, and had bought it for himself at a fair, making no bad
bargain ; yet he is a true king, for no man would daunt him
from doing his duty to his people, either by strength or by
riches. It is enormously ironic that this should be set on the

240 BLACK LAMB AND GREY FALCON

walls of a city that was the antithesis of the peasant state, that
maintained for centuries the most rigid system of aristocracy
and the most narrowly bourgeois ethos imaginable. The incon-
gruity will account for a certain coldness shown towards the
Yugoslavian ideal in Dubrovnik ; which itself appears ironical
when it is considered that after Dubrovnik was destroyed by the
great powers no force on earth could have come to its rescue
except the peasant state of Serbia.

For an ideal first visit the traveller should go into the city and
find the light just faintly blue with dusk in the open space that
lies inside the gate, and has for its centre the famous fountain
by the fifteenth-century Neapolitan architect Onofrio de la Cava.
This is a masterpiece, the size of a small chapel, a domed piece
of masonry with fourteen jets of water, each leaping from a
sculptured plaque set in the middle of a panel divided by two
slender pilasters, into a continuous trough that runs all round
the fountain ; as useful as any horse-trough, and as lovely and
elevating as an altar. On the two steps that raise it from the
pavement there always lie some carpets with their sellers gossip-
ing beside them. At this hour all cats are grey and all carpets
are beautiful ; the colours, fused by the evening, acquire richness.
On one side of this square is another of the bland little churches
which Dalmatians built so often and so well, a town sister of
that we had seen in the village where the retired sea captains
lived. At this hour its golden stone gives it an air of enjoying
its own private sunset, prolonged after the common one. It
has a pretty and secular rose-window which might be the brooch
for a bride’s bosom. Beside it is a Franciscan convent, with a
most definite and sensible Pietk over a late Gothic portal. The
Madonna looks as if, had it been in her hands, she would have
stopped the whole affair ; she is in no degree gloating over the
spectacular fate of her son. She is not peasant, she is noble ; it
is hardly possible to consider her as seducible by the most exalted
destiny. Facing these across the square is the old arsenal, its
facade pierced by an arch ; people walk through it to a garden
beyond, where lamps shine among trees, and there is a sound of
music. For background there are the huge city walls, good as
strength, good as honesty.

Ahead runs the main street of the town, a paved fairway,
forbidden to wheeled traffic, lined with comely seventeenth-
century houses that have shops on their ground floor. At this

DUBROVNIK

The fountain of Onofrio de la Cava and Church of St. Saviour

DUBROVNIK

DALMATIA

241

time it is the scene of the Corso, an institution which is the
heart of social life in every Yugoslavian town, and indeed of
nearly all towns and villages in the Balkans. All of the popula-
tion who have clothing up to the general standard — I have
never seen a person in rags and patches join a Corso in a town
where good homespun or manufactured textiles are the usual
wear, though in poverty-stricken districts I have seen an entire
Corso bearing itself with dignity in tatters — join in a procession
which walks up and down the main street for an hour or so
about sunset. At one moment there is nobody there, just a
few people going about the shops or sitting outside cafds ; at
the next the street is full of all the human beings in the town that
feel able to take part in the life of their kind, each one holding
up the head and bearing the body so that it may be seen, each
one chattering and being a little gayer than in private, each one
attempting to establish its individuality. Yet the attempt defeats
itself, for this mass of people, moving up and down the length of
the street and slowly becoming more and more like each other
because of the settling darkness, makes a human being seem
no more than a drop of water in a stream. In a stream, more-
over, that does not run for ever. The Corso ends as suddenly
as it begins. At one instant the vital essence of the town chokes
the street with its coursing ; the next, the empty pavement is
left to the night.

But while it lasts the Corso is life, for what that is worth in
this particular corner of the earth ; and here, in Dubrovnik,
life still has something of the value it must have had in
Venice when she was young. A city that had made good bread
had learned to make good cake also. A city that had built
itself up by good sense and industry had formed a powerful
secondary intention of elegance. It is a hundred and thirty
years ago that Dubrovnik ceased to exist as a republic, but its
buildings are the unaltered cast of its magnificence, its people
have still the vivacity of those who possess and can enjoy. Here
the urbanity of the Dalmatian cities becomes metropolitan.
Follow this Corso and you will find yourself in the same dream
that is dreamed by London and Paris and New York ; the
dream that there is no limit to the distance which man can travel
from his base, the cabbage-patch, that there is no pleasure too
delicate to be bought by all of us, if the world will but go on
getting richer. This is not a dream to be despised ; it comes

242 BLACK LAMB AND GREY FALCON

from man's more amiable parts, it is imtainted by cruelty, it
springs simply from a desire to escape from the horror that is
indeed implicit in all man’s simpler relationships with the
earth. It cannot be realised in a city so great as London or
Paris or New York, or even the later Venice ; it was perhaps
possible to realise it in a city no larger than Dubrovnik, which
indeed neither was nor is very far from the cabbage-patches.
For on any fine night there are some peasants from the country-
side outside the walls who have come to walk in the Corso.

To taste the flavour of this Corso and this city, it is good
to turn for a minute from the main street into one of the side
streets. They mount steep and narrow to the walls which
outline the squarish peninsula on which the city stands ; close-
pressed lines of houses which are left at this hour to sleeping
children, the old, and servant-maids, rich in carved portals and
balconies, and perfumed with the spring. For it took the in-
dustrial revolution to make man conceive the obscene idea of a
town as nothing but houses. These carved portals and balconies
are twined with flowers that are black because of the evening,
but would be scarlet by day, and behind high walls countless little
gardens send out their sweetness. Back in the main street the
people from these houses and gardens sweep down towards their
piazza, past a certain statue which you may have seen in other
towns, perhaps in front of the Rathaus at Bremen. Such statues
are said to represent the hero Orlando or Roland who defeated
the Saracens : they are the sign that a city is part of liberal
and lawful Christendom. To the left of the crowd is the Custom
House and Mint, in which the history of their forebears for
three centuries is written in three storeys. In the fourteenth
century the citizens of the Republic built themselves a Custom
House, just somewhere to take in the parcels ; in that age the
hand of man worked right, and the courtyard is perfection. A
hundred years later so many parcels had come in that the citizens
were refined folk and could build a second storey for literary
gatherings and social assemblies, as lovely as Venetian Gothic
could make it. Prosperity became complicated and lush, the
next hundred years brought the necessity of establishing a
handsome Mint on the top floor, in the Renaissance style ; and
for sheer lavishness they faced the Custom House with a loggia.
Because the people who did this were of the same blood, working
in a civilisation that their blood and none other had made.

"DALMATIA

*43

these different styles are made one by an inner coherence. The
building has a light, fresh, simple charm.

They mill there darkly, the people of Dubrovnik, the build-
ings running up above them into that whiteness which hangs
alrave the earth the instant before the fall of the night, which
is disturbed and dispersed by the coarser whiteness of the
electric standards. The Custom House is faced by the Church
of St. Blaise, a great baroque mass standing on a balustraded
platform, like a captive balloon filled with infinity. In front
is an old tower with a huge toy clock: at the hour two giant
bronze figures of men come out and beat a bell. The crowd
will lift their heads to see them, as their fathers have done for
some hundreds of years. Next to that is the town cafe, a noble
building, where one eats well, looking on to the harbour ; for
we have reached the other side of the peninsula now, the wind
that blows in through the archways is salt. Then to the right
is the Rector’s Palace, that incomparable building, the special
glory of Dubrovnik, and even of Dalmatia, the work of
Michelozzo Michelozzi the Florentine and George the Dalmatian,
known as Orsini. Simply it consists of a two-storeyed build-
ing, the ground floor shielded by a loggia of six arches, the upper
floor showing eight Gothic windows. It is imperfect : it once
had a tower at each end, and these have gone. Nevertheless,
its effect is complete and delightful, and, like all masterpieces of
architecture, it expresses an opinion about the activities which
are going to be carried on under its roof. Chartres is a specula-'
tion concerning the nature of God and of holiness. The
Belvedere in Vienna is a speculation concerning political power.
By the balanced treatment of masses and the suggestion of
fertility in springing arches and proliferating capitals, the
Rector's Palace puts forward an ideal of an ordered and creative
society. It is the most explicit building in an amazingly explicit
town, that has also an explicit history, with a beginning and
an end. It is another example of the visibility of life which is
the special character of Yugoslavia, at least so far as those
territories which have not been affected by the Teutonic con-
fusion are concerned.

The Corso says, “ This is the city our fathers made ", The
city says, " These are the men and women we have made ”.
If you should turn aside and go into the caf^ to eat an evening
meal, which here should be preferably the Englische Platte,

244 BLACK LAMB AND GREY FALCON

an anthology of cold meats chosen by a real scholar of the
subject, the implications of this display will keep you busy for
the night. There is, of course, the obvious meaning of
Dubrovnik. It was quite truly a republic : not a protectorate,
but an independent power, the only patch of territory on the
whole Dalmatian coast, save for a few unimportant acres near
Split, that never fell under the rule of either Hungary or Venice.
It was a republic that was a miracle : on this tiny peninsula,
which is perhaps half a mile across, was based a great eco-
nomic empire. From Dubrovnik the caravans started for the
overland journey to Constantinople. This was the gateway to
the East; and it exploited its position with such commercial
and financial and naval genius that its ships were familiar
all over the known world, while it owned factories and ware-
houses in every considerable port of Southern Europe and in
some ports of the North, and held huge investments such as
mines and quarries in the Balkans. Its history is illuminated
by our word " argosy ", which means nothing more than a
vessel from Ragusa. It is as extraordinary as if the city of
London were to have carried out the major part of the com-
mercial achievements of the British Empire and had created
Threadneedle Street, with no more territory than itself and
about three or four hundred square miles in the home counties
which it had gradually acquired by conquest and purchase.
That is the primary miracle of Dubrovnik ; that and its resist-
ance to Turkey, which for century after century coveted the
port as the key to the Adriatic and the invasion of Italy, yet
could never dare to seize it because of the diplomatic genius of
its defenders.

But as one contemplates the town other issues crowd on the
mind. First, the appalling lack of accumulation observable in
history, the perpetual cancellation of human achievement, which
is the work of careless and violent nature. This place owes its
foundation to the ferocity of mankind towards its own kind.
For Dubrovnik was first settled by fugitives from the Greek
city of Epidaurus, which is ten miles further south down the
coast, and from the Roman city of Salonae, when these were
destroyed by the barbarians, and was later augmented by Slavs
who had come to these parts as members of the barbarian forces.
It was then monstrously harried by the still greater ferocity
of fire and earthquake. Some of the fires might be ascribed to

DALMATIA

>45

human agency, for the prosperity of the group — which was due
to its fusion of Greek and Roman culture with Slav virility —
meant that they were well worth attacking and therefore they
had to make their rocky peninsula into a fortress with abundant
stores of munitions. They were, therefore, peculiarly subject to
fires arising out of gunpowder explosions. The Rector’s Palace
was twice burned down for this reason during twenty-seven
years. But such damage was trifling compared to the devasta-
tion wrought by earthquakes.

The bland little church beside the domed fountain at the
City Gate was built in the sixteenth century as a thanksgiving
by those who had been spared from an earthquake which, in a
first convulsion, shook down houses that were then valued at
five thousand pounds, and then continued as a series of shocks
for over eighteen months ; and there was apparently an earth-
quake of some degree in this district every twenty years. But
the worst was the catastrophe of 1667. The sea was tilted back
from the harbour four times, each time leaving it bone dry,
and each time rushing back in a flood-wave which pounded
many vessels to pieces against the docks and cliffs. The greater
part of the public buildings and many private houses were in
ruins, and the Rector of the Republic and five thousand citizens
were buried underneath them. Then fire broke out ; and later
still bands of wolfish peasants from the mountain areas devas-
tated by Venetian misrule and Turkish warfare ceune down and
plundered what was left.

We know, by a curious chance, exactly what we lost in the
way of architecture on that occasion. In the baroque church
opposite the Rector’s Palace there is a two-foot-high silver
statuette of St. Blaise, who is the patron saint of the city, and
he holds in his hand a silver model of Dubrovnik as it was before
the earthquake. It shows us the setting for a fairy-tale. In
particular it shows the Cathedral, which was built by Richard
Coeur-de-Lion as a thanksgiving for his escape from shipwreck
on this coast, as a thirteenth-century building of great beauty
and idiosyncrasy, and the main street as a unique expression of
commercial pride, a line of houses that were true palaces in their
upper parts and shops and offices below. We can deduce also
that there was an immense loss of pictures, sculptures, textiles,
jewels and books, which had been drawn by the Republic from
West and East during her centuries of successful trading,
vou 1 R

246 BLACK LAMB AND GREY FALCON

Indeed, vre know of one irreparable loss, so great that we cannot
imagine what its marvellous content may have been. There
existed in Bosnia a society that was at once barbarous and
civilised, an indirect heir to Byzantine civilisation and able to
fight Rome on doctrinal points as a logic-chopping equal, but
savage and murderous. This society was destroyed by the
Turk. At the end of the fifteenth century, Ca^erine, the
widow of the last King of Bosnia, murdered by his illegitimate
son, who was later himself flayed alive by Mahomet II, fled to
Dubrovnik and lived there till she went to Rome to die. Before
she left she gave some choral books, richly illustrated and
bound, to the monks of the Franciscan Monastery, who had a
famous library. If these books had survived they would have
been a glimpse of a world about which we can now only guess :
but the whole library perished.

What is the use of ascribing any catastrophe to nature ?
Nearly always man’s inherent malignity comes in and uses the
opportunities it offers to create a graver catastrophe. At this
moment the Turks came down on the Republic to plunder its
helplessness, though their relationship had till then been friendly.
Kara Mustapha, the Turkish Grand Vizier, a demented alcoholic,
pretended that the armed resistance the citizens had been forced
to put up against the wretched looters from the mountains
was in some obscure way an offence against Turkish nationals,
and on this pretext and on confused allegations of breach of
tariff agreements, he demanded the payment of a million ducats,
or nearly half a million pounds. He also demanded that the
goods of every citizen who had been killed in the earthquake
should be handed to the Sublime Porte, the Republic being
(he suddenly claimed) a Turkish possession. For fifteen years
the Republic had to fight for its rights and keep the aggressors
at bay, which it was able to do by using its commercial potency
and its diplomatic genius against the Turks when they were
already rocking on their feet under the blows of Austria and
Hungary. Those were its sole weapons. France, as professed
defender of Christianity and order in Europe, should have aided
the Republic. But Louis XIV would not lift his little finger to
help her, partly because she had been an ally of Spain, partly
because the dreary piece of death-in-life, Madame de Maintenon,
supreme type of the she-alligator whom men often like and
admire, had so inflamed him with pro-Jesuit peission that a

DALMATIA

*47

mere rumour that the Republican envoy was a Jansenist was
enough to make him cancel his mission.

The story of what happened to the four ambassadors who
left to plead with the Turkish Government is one of classic
justifications of the human race : almost a promise that there
is something to balance its malignity. Caboga and Bucchia
were sent to Constantinople to state the independence of the
Republic. They were, by a technique familiar to us to-day,
faced with documents admitting that the Republic was a
Turkish possession and told with threats and curses that they
must sign them. They refused. Dazed and wearied by hours
of bullying they still refused, and were thrown into a plague-
stricken prison. There they lay for years, sometimes smuggling
home dispatches written in their excrement on packing paper.
Their colleagues. Bona and Gozzi, went to Sarajevo to make the
same statement of independence to the Pasha of Bosnia, and
were likewise thrown into captivity. They were dragged behind
the Turkish Army on a war it was conducting with Russia on
the Danube, and there thrown in irons into the dungeons of a
fortress in a malarial district, and told they must remain prisoners
until they had signed the documents which Cadoga and Bucchia
had refused to sign in Constantinople. There Bona died. A
Ragusan priest who had settled in the district stood by to give
him the last sacrament, but was prevented by the jailers. There
is no knowing how many such martyrs might have been
demanded of Dubrovnik and furnished by her, had not the
Turks then been defeated outside Vienna by John Sobieski,
King of Poland. Kara Mustapha w’as executed, and there was
lifted from the Republic a fear as black as any we have felt
to-day.

It is a glorious story, yet a sad one. What humanity could
do if it could but have a fair course to run, if fire and pestilence
did not gird our steps and earthquakes engulf them, if man did
not match his creativeness with evil that casts down and
destroys ! It can at least be said that Dubrovnik ran well in
this obstacle race. But there is not such exaltation in the
spectacle when it is considered how she had to train for that
victory, both so far as it was commercial and diplomatic in
origin. Everywhere in the Dalmatian cities the class struggle
was intense. The constitution of the cities provided for the
impartial administration of justice, legal and economic, to

248 BLACK LAMB AND GREY FALCON

persons arranged in castes and made to remain there, irrespective
of their merits, with the utmost rigid injustice. This was at first
due to historical necessity. The first-comers in a settlement, who
had the pick of the economic findings and whatever culture was
going, might really be acting in the public interest as well as
defending their own private ends, when they insisted on reserving
to themselves all possible social power and not sharing it with
later-comers, who might be barbarians or refugees demoralised
by years of savage warfare. But it led to abuses which can be
measured by the continual rebellions and the horrible massacres
which happened in every city on the coast. In Hvar, for
instance, the island where the air is so sweet, the plebeians took
oath on a crucifix held by a priest that they would slaughter all
the nobles. The Christ on the crucifix bled at the nose, the priest
fell dead. Nevertheless the plebeians carried out their plans, and
massacred many of the nobles in the Hall of Justice in the pre-
sence of the Rector, but were overcome by a punitive expedition
of the Venetian fleet and themselves put to death or mutilated.

This caste system never led to such rebellions in Dubrovnik,
partly because the economic well-being of the community
choked all discontent with cream, partly because they had
little chance of succeeding : but it existed in a more stringent
form than anywhere else. The population was divided into
three classes ; the nobles, the commoners and the workers.
The last were utterly without say in the government. They did
not vote and they could hold no office. The conunoners also had
no votes, but might hold certain unimportant offices, though only
if appointed by the nobles. The actual power of government
was entirely in the hands of the nobles. The body in which
sovereignty finally rested was the Grand Council, which con-
sisted of all males over eighteen belonging to families confirmed
as noble in the register known as the Golden Book. This
Council deputed its executive powers to a Senate of forty-five
members who met four times a week and at times of emergency ;
and they again deputed their powers to a Council of Seven
(this had numbered eleven until the earthquake) who exercised
judicial power and performed all diplomatic functions, a
Council of Three, who acted as a tribune of constitutional
law, and a Council of Six, who administered the Exchequer.
There were other executive bodies, but this is a rough idea of
the anatomy of the Republic. It must be remembered that

DALMATIA

*49

these classes were separated in all departments of their lives
as rigidly as the Hindu castes. No member of any class was
permitted to marry into either of the other two classes ; if he
did so he lost his position in his own class and his children had
to take the rank of the inferior parent. Social relations between
the classes were unthinkable.

It is interesting that this system should have survived when
all real differences in the quality of classes had been levelled by
general prosperity, when there might be commoners and even
workers who were as rich and as cultured as any noble. It is
interesting, too, that it should have survived even when the
classes were cleft from within by disputes. When Marmont
went to Dubrovnik in 1808 he found that the nobles were
divided into two parties, one called the Salamancans and the
other the Sorbonnais. These names referred to some controversy
arising out of the wars between Charles the Fifth of Spain and
Francis the First of France, a mere matter of two hundred and
fifty years before. It had happened that in the earthquake of
1667 a very large proportion of the noble class was destroyed,
and it was necessary to restore it to strength by including a
number of commoners. These the Salamancans, sympathisers
with Spanish absolutism, would not treat as equals ; but the
Sorbonnais, Francophil and inclined to a comparative liberalism,
accepted them fully. It is also a possible factor in the situation
that the Sorbonnais had been specially depleted by the earth-
quake casualties and wanted to keep up their numbers. Be
that as it may, the two parties were exactly equal in status and
sat together on the Councils, but they had no social relations
and did not even greet each other on the streets ; and a mis-
alliance between members of the two parties was as serious in
its consequences as a misalliance between classes.

But this was far from being the only sop offered by the
Republic to that disagreeable appetite, the desire of a human
being to feel contempt for another not in fact very different
froiix himself. The commoners in their turn were divided into
the confraternities of St. Anthony and St. Lazarus, who were
as rancorous in their relationship as the Salamancans and the
Sorbonnais. The survival of this three-class system in spite of
these dissensions suggests that it was actually a fusion of long-
standing customs, native to the different races which composed
the Republic : say a variation of the classical system of aristo-

2SO BLACK LAMB AND GREY FALCON

cracy grafted on some ancient Illyrian organisation of which
we now know nothing, which pleased the Slav late-comers,
though themselves democratic in tendency, because of the solid
framework it gave to internal bickerings. “ Whether they agree
or do not agree," an exasperated Roman emperor wrote of the first
Slav tribes to appear within the empire’s ken, "very soon they fall
into disturbances among themselves, because they feel a mutual
loathing and cannot bear to accommodate one another."

The system, of course, was far from being merely silly. One
may wonder how it survived ; one cannot question the benefits
it conferred by surviving. The Republic was surrounded by
greedy empires whom she had to keep at arm's-length by
negotiation lest she perish ; first Hungary, then Venice, then
Turkey. Foreign affairs were her domestic affairs ; and it was
necessary that they should be conducted in complete secrecy
with enormous discretion. It must never be learned by one
empire what had been promised by or to another empire, and
none of the greedy pack could be allowed to know the pre-
cise amount of the Republic’s resources. There was therefore
every reason to found a class of governors who were so highly
privileged that they would protect the status quo of the com-
munity at all costs, who could hand on training in the art
of diplomacy from father to son, and who were so few in
number that it would be easy to detect a case of blabbing.
They were very few indeed. In the fifteenth century, when the
whole population was certainly to be counted by tens of
thousands, there were only thirty-three noble families. These
could easily be supervised in all their goings and comings by
those who lived in the same confined area.

But it is curious that this ultra-conservative aristocratic
government should develop a tendency which is often held to be
a characteristic vice of democracy. Dubrovnik dreaded above
all things the emergence of dominant personalities. The pro-
visions by which this dread is expressed in the constitution are
the chief differences which distinguish it from its obvious
Venetian model. The Senate was elected for life, and there
you had your small group of hereditary diplomats. But these
elections had to be confirmed annually, and infinite precautions
were taken lest any Senator should seize excessive power and
attempt dictatorship. The Rector wore a superb toga of red
silk with a stole of black velvet over the left shoulder, and was

DALMATIA

as*

preceded in his comings and goings by musicians and twenty
palace guards ; but he held his office for just one month, and
could be re-elected only after intervals of two years ; and this
brevity of tenure was the result of ever-anxious revision, for the
term had originally been three months, had been reduced to two,
and was finally brought down to the single month. He was
also held prisoner within the palace while he held office, and
could leave it only for state appearances, such as his obligatory
solemn visit to the Cathedral.

The lesser offices were as subject to restriction. The judici-
ary and diplomatic Council of &ven was elected afresh every
year, and could not be re-elected for another year. The Council
of Three, who settled all questions of constitutional law, was
also elected for but one year. The Council of Six, who adminis-
tered the state finances, was elected for three years. There
were also certain regulations which prevented the dominance
of people of any particular age. The Council of Seven might
be of any adult age, but the youngest had to act as Foreign
Secretary ; but the Council of Three had all to be over fifty.
These devices were entirely justified by their success. Only
once, and that very early in the history of Dubrovnik, did a
noble try to become a dictator ; and then he received no support,
save from the wholly unrepresented workers, and was forced to
suicide. Later, in the seventeenth century, some nobles were
seduced by the Duke of Savoy into a conspiracy to seize power,
but they were arrested at a masked ball on the last day of
Carnival, and executed by general consent of the community.

That terror of the emergent personality is not the only
trait of this aristocratic society which recalls its contrary.
There is a great deal in the history of Dubrovnik which had
its counterpart among our Puritan capitalists. The nobles
believed in education even more seriously than was the custom
of their kind in other Dalmatian towns, though even there the
standard was high : the Venetian Governor of Split is found
complaining of young men who came back from their studies
at Oxford filled with subversive notions. But they did not, as
might have been expected, try to keep learning as a class
prerogative. As well as sending their own sons to universities
in Italy and France and Spain and England, they built public
schools which were open to the children of all three classes.
They also created a hospital system which included the first

BLACK LAMB AND GREY FALCON

*S*

foundling hospital in the whole civilised world, and they were as
advanced in their treatment of housing problems. After one of
the earlier earthquakes they put in hand a town-planning scheme
which considered the interests of the whole community, and their
arrangements for a water supply were not only ahead of the time as
an engineering project but made an attempt to serve every home.

They also anticipated philanthropists of a much later date
and a wholly different soci^ setting in their attitude to the slave-
trade. In 1417 they passed what was the first anti-slavery
legislation except for our own English laws discouraging the
export of human cargo from Bristol. This was no case of
damning a sin for which they had no mind, since a great deal
of money could be made in the Mediterranean slave-trade, a
considerable amount of which had come to certain Republican
merchants living further north on the coast ; and it must be
remembered that, owing to the survival of the feudal system in
the Balkans long after it had passed away from the rest of
Europe, the state of serfdom was taken for granted by many of
the peoples under the Republic’s rule or in relationship with
her. But the Grand Council passed a law providing that any-
body selling a slave should be liable to a heavy fine and six
months’ imprisonment, “ since it must be held to be base,
wicked and abominable, and contrary to all humanity, and to
redound to the great disgrace o( our city, that the human form,
made after the image and similitude of our Creator, should be
turned to mercenary profit, and sold as if it were brute beast ".
Fifty years later they tightened up this law and made the punish-
ment harsher, adding the proviso that if a slave-trader could
not recover his victims from captivity within a certain period
after he had been directed to do so by the authorities, he was
to be hanged. All through the next three centuries, until the
Mediterranean slave-trade became wholly extinct, it was a
favourite form of philanthropy among the wealthy Republicans
to buy slaves their freedom.

There were other Whig preferences in Dubrovnik : the right
of asylum, for instance, was strictly maintained. When the
Turks beat the Serbs at Kossovo in 1389 one of the defeated
princes, the despot George Brankovitch, took refuge in Dubrov-
nik and was hospitably received, though the Republic was an
ally of Turkey. When the Sultan Murad II protested and de-
manded that he should be delivered up, the Senate answered,

DALMATIA

*53

“ We, men of Ragusa, live only by our faith, and according to
that faith we would have sheltered you also, had you fled
hither.” But there is a quality familiar to us Westerners not
only in the political but in the social life of the Republic. The
citizens kept extremely comfortable establishments, with the
best of food and drink and furniture, but their luxury was
strictly curbed in certain directions. There was never any
theatre in Dubrovnik till fifty years after the destruction of the
Republic, one was built by the Austrians. In the fifteenth
century, which was a gay enough season for the rest of Europe,
Palladius writes : " To make manifest how great is the severity
and diligence of the Ragusans in the bringing up of their
children, one thing I will not pass over, that they suffer no
artistic exercises to exist in the city but those of literature. And
if jousters or acrobats approach they are forthwith cast out lest
the youth (which they would keep open for letters or for mer-
chandising) be corrupted by such low exhibitions.”

There must have been many an English family of wealthy
bankers and manufacturers in Victorian days who ate vast
meals and slept in the best Irish linen and were surrounded by
the finest mahogany and the most distinguished works of Mr.
Leader and Mr. Sidney Cooper (and, perhaps, thanks to
John Ruskin, some really good Italian pictures), but who never
set foot in a theatre or music-hall or circus. But an even
more significant parallel between the Republic and England is
to be found in the hobbies of the wealthier citizens. English
science owes a great deal to the discoveries of business men,
particularly among the Quakers, who took to some form of
research as an amusement to fill in their spare time. So was
it also in Dubrovnik. The citizens had a certain taste for
letters, though chiefly for those exercises which are to literature
as topiary is to gardening, such as the composition of classical
or Italian verses in an extremely formal style ; but their real
passion was for mathematics and the physical sciences. They
produced many amateurs of these, and some professionals, of
whom the most notable was Roger Joseph Boscovitch, a wild
Slav version of the French encyclopaedists, a mystic, a mathe-
matician and physicist, a poet and diplomat. In his writings
and those of his compatriots who followed the same passion, there
are paeans to science as the illuminator of the works of God,
which have countless analogues in the writings of Englishmen of

854 BLACK LAMB AND GREY FALCON

the same class in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries.

But the resemblance does not stop there. There is a certain
case to be made against the bourgeois class of Englishmen that
developed into the Nonconformist Liberals who followed Mr.
Gladstone through his triumphs, and reared their sons to follow
Lord Oxford and Mr. Lloyd George to the twilight hour of their
faith. It might be charged against them that their philanthropy
consisted of giving sops to the populace which would make it
forget that their masters had seized all the means of production
and distribution, and therefore held them in a state of complete
economic subjection. It might be charged against them also
that they were virtuous only when it suited their pockets, and
that while they would welcome Kossuth or Mazzini or any other
defender of oppressed people outside the British Empire, they
were indifferent to what happened inside it. It might be charged
against them that they cared little how much truth there was
in the bitter description of our exports to the coloured races,
" Bibles, rum, and rifles ", so long as there was truth in the
other saying, " Trade follows the flag ". There is enough
testimony to the virtue of this class to make such charges not
worth discussing with any heat of spirit ; but there was enough
truth in them to make it impossible to regard the accused as an
ideal group, and the society which produced them as para-
disaical. It is even so with Dubrovnik.

The Republic was extremely pious. She spoke of her
Christianity at all times, and in her Golden Book there is a
prayer for the magistrates of the Republic which runs ; " O
Lord, Father Almighty, who hast chosen this Republic to serve
Thee, choose, we beseech Thee, our governors, according to
Thy Will and our necessity : that so, fearing Thee and keeping
Thy Holy Commandments, they may cherish and direct us in
true charity. Amen.” Never was there a city so full of churches
and chapels, never was there a people who submitted more
loyally to the discipline of the Church. But there was a certain
incongruity with this in their foreign policy. Had Dubrovnik
the right to pose as a proud and fastidious Catholic power con-
sidering her relations with the Ottoman Empire, the devouring
enemy of Christendom ? The other Dalmatian towns were less
complaisant than Venice in their attitude to the Turks, the
Republic far more. She never fought the Turk. She paid him
tribute, and tribute, and again tribute.

DALMATIA

255

Every year two envoys left the city for Constantinople with
their load of golden ducats, which amounted, after several
increases, to fifteen thousand. They wore a special dress,
known as the uniform of the divan, and had their beards
well grown. They placed their affairs in order, embraced their
families, attended Mass at the Cathedral, and were bidden
godspeed by the Rector under the arches of his palace. Then,
with their cashier, their barber, numerous secretaries and in'
terpreters, a troop of armed guards, and a priest with a portable
altar, they set forth on the fifteen days’ journey to the Bosphorus.
It was not a very dangerous journey, for the caravans of the
Republic made it an established trade route. But the envoys
had to stay there for twelve months, till the next two envoys
arrived and took their place, and the negotiation of subtle
business with tyrants of an alien and undecipherable race, while
physically at their mercy, was a dangerous task, which was
usually performed competently and heroically. This was not,
however, the only business they transacted with the Turks. The
envoys to Constantinople had also to do a great deal of bribery,
for there was a sliding scale of tips which covered every official at
the Porte from the lowest to the highest. This burden increased
yearly as the Turkish Empire increased in size to the point of
unwieldiness, and the local officials became more and more im-
portant. As time went on it was almost as necessary to bribe the
Sandjakbeg of Herzegovina and the Pasha of Bosnia and their
staffs as it was to make the proper payments to the Sublime Porte.

All this would be very well, if Dubrovnik had avowed that
she was an independent commercial power in a disadvantageous
military and naval position, and that she valued her conunerce
and independence so highly that she would pay the Turks a
great ransom for them. But it is not so pleasing in a power that
boasts of being fervent and fastidious in its Christianity. Of
course it can be claimed that Dubrovnik was enabled by her
relations with the Porte to render enormous services to the
Christians within the territories conquered by the Turks ; that
wherever her mercantile colonies were established — and that
included towns all over Bosnia and Serbia and Bulgaria and
Wallachia and even Turkey itself — the Christians enjoyed a
certain degree of legal protection and religious freedom. But
on the other hand the Republic won for herself the right to pay
only two or sometimes one and a half per cent on her imports

2s6 black lamb and grey falcon

and exports into and out of the Ottoman Empire, while all the
rest of the world had to pay five per cent. It is no use. Nothing
can make this situation smell quite like the rose. If Dickens
had known the facts he might have felt about Dubrovnik as he
felt about Mr. Chadband ; and if Chesterton had attended to
them he might have loathed it as much as he loathed cocoa.

Especially is this readiness to rub along with the Turks
displeasing in a power which professed to be so fervent and
fastidious in its Christianity that it could not let the Orthodox
Church set foot within its gates. Theoretically, the Republic
upheld religious tolerance. But in practice she treated it as a
fair flower that was more admirable if it blossomed on foreign
soil. Though Dubrovnik had many visitors, and even some
natives, who were members of the Orthodox Church, they
were not allowed to have any place of worship within the
Republic. It curiously happened that in the eighteenth century
this led to serious difficulties with Catherine the Great, when her
fleet came to the Mediterranean and Adriatic to tidy up the
remains of Turkish sea-power. Her lover Orloff was the
Admiral in charge, and he presented the Republic with an
agreement defining her neutrality, which included demands for
the opening of an Orthodox Church for public use in Dubrovnik,
and the establishment of a Russian consulate in the city, to
protect not only Russians but all members of the Orthodox
Church. The second request was granted, the first refused.
Jesuit influence, and the Pope himself, were again illustrating
the unfailing disposition of the Roman Catholic Church to fight
the Orthodox Church with a vehemence which could not have
been exceeded if the enemy had represented paganism instead
of schism, whatever suffering this campaign might bring to the
unhappy peoples of the Balkan Peninsula.

The agreement Russia offered the Republic was in every
other regard satisfactory ; but for three years an envoy from
Dubrovnik argued the point in St. Petersburg, and in the end
won it, by using the influence of Austria and Poland, and the
personal affection that the Prussian Ambassador to Russia
happened to feel for the beauty of the city. It is pathetic how
these Northerners love the South. In the end, after two more
years, Orloff had to sign a treaty with Dubrovnik, by which
she exchanged the right to trade in Russian waters for her
sanction of the appointment of a Russian Consul, who was

DALMATIA

aS7

to protect only Russian subjects, and who might build in his
house a private chapel at which his own nationals might worship
according to the Orthodox rite. History is looked at through
the wrong end of the opera-glasses when it is recorded that the
Republican envoy signed the treaty, went straight to Rome
and was given the warmest thanks for the services he and the
Republic had rendered the Holy Catholic religion by " for-
bidding the construction of a Greek chapel Such pettiness
is almost grand. Owing to a change in Russia’s foreign policy
the Consul was never appointed, and the Republic permitted
instead the building of a tiny chapel in a deserted spot over a
mile from the city walls. When, in 1804, the Republic was
again asked to grant its Orthodox citizens the free practice of
their religion it absolutely refused.

This intolerance led ultimately to the extinction of the
Republic. At the Congress of Vienna the Czar Alexander
could have saved it, and the cause of this small defenceless
state might well have appealed to his mystic liberalism ; but
he remembered that the Republic had obstinately affronted his
grandmother, and that in order to persecute his own religion,
and he withheld his protection. But it would be a mistake to
suppose that in the defence of the Papacy the Republic acted
out of fidelity to its religious principles and contempt for its
worldly interests. It found — and here we find it achieving
a feat of economy that has brought on its English prototypes
many a reproach — that in serving the one it served the other.
When an Austrian Commissioner was taking over Dubrovnik
after it had been abandoned by the French, he remarked to
one of the nobles that he was amazed by the number of
religious establishments in the city. The answer was given,
“ There is no cause for amazement there. Every one of them
was as much good to us as a round-house.” And indeed this
was true. The Roman Catholic fervour of this state that lay
on the very border of the Orthodox territory guaranteed her
the protection of two great powers, Spain and the Papacy.
Again there is a smell not of the rose.

This equivocal character of the Republic is worth consider-
ing, because it affects an argument frequently used in the
course of that soft modern propaganda in favour of Roman
Catholicism which gives testimony, not to the merits or demerits
of that faith, but to the woolliness of modern education. It is

258 BLACK LAMB AND GREY FALCON

sometimes put forward that it is right to join the Roman
Catholic Church because it produces pleasanter and more
mellow characters than Protestantism. This, of course, is a
claim that the Church itself would regard with contempt. The
state of mind demanded firam a Roman Catholic is belief that
certain historic events occurred in fact as they are stated to
have occurred by the teachers of the Church, and that the
interpretation of life contained in their teachings is literally
and invariably true. If membership of the Church inevitably
produced personalities intolerable to all other human beings,
that would have no bearing on the validity of the faith. But
those who do not understand this make their bad argument
worse by an allegation that Roman Catholicism discourages
two undesirable types, the Puritan and his complicated brother,
the hypocritical reformist capitalist, and that Protestantism
encourages them. Yet the Puritan appears throughout the
ages under any form of religion or none, under paganism and
Christianity, orthodox and heretical alike, under Catholicism
and Protestantism, under deism and rationalism, and in each
case the authorities have sometimes encouraged and sometimes
discouraged him. There is indeed some excuse for the pretence
that Protestantism has had a special affection for the reformist
capitalist, because geographical rather than psychological con*
ditions have made him a conspicuous figure in the Northern
countries which resisted the Counter-Reformation. But here
in Dubrovnik, here in the Republic of Ragusa, is a complete
chapter of history, with a beginning and an end, which shows
that this type can spring up in a soil completely free from any
contamination of Protestantism, and can enjoy century after
century the unqualified approbation of Rome.

EXPEDITION

I. Tsavtat

The road runs along the coast between rocky banks dripping
with the golden hair of broom. The hillside above and below
us was astonishing in its fertility, although even here the rain
was diluting the spring to a quarter of its proper strength.
There was everywhere the sweet -smelling scrub, and thickets of

DALMATIA

>59

oleander, and the grey-blue swords of aloes ; and on the lower
slopes were olive terraces and lines of cypresses, spurting up
with a vitality strange to see in what is black and not g^reen.
Oaks there were — the name Dubrovnik means a grove of
oaks ; and where there were some square yards of level ground
there were thick-trunked patriarchal planes, with branches
enough to cover an army of concubines. The sea looked poverty-
stricken, because, being here without islands, it had no share
in this feast served up by the rising sap. There was presented
a vision of facility, of effortless growth as the way to salva-
tion. This coast, in ancient times, was a centre of the cult
of Fan.

There were, however, other interesting residents of a super-
natural character. Somewhere up in the mountains on this
road is the cave in which Cadmus and his wife suffered their
metamorphosis. They were so distressed by the misfortunes
of their children, who were persecuted by Hera, that they
begged the gods to turn them into snakes. Ovid made a lovely
verse of it. When Cadmus had suffered the change :

. . . “ illc suae lambebat coniugis ora
inque sinus caros, veluti cognosceret, ibat
et dabat amplexus adsuetaque colla petebat.
quisquis adest (aderant comites), terrentur ; at ilia
lubrica permulcet cristati colla draconis,
et subito duo sunt iunctoque volumine serpunt,
donee in adpositi nemoris subiere latebras,
nimc quoque nec fugiunt hominem nec vulnere laedunt
quidque prius fuerint, placidi meminere dracones.” *

It is an apt symbol of the numbness that comes on the broken-
hearted. They become wise ; they find comfort in old com-
panionship ; but they lose the old human anatomy, the sensa-
tions no longer follow the path of the nerves, the muscles no
longer offer their multifold reaction to the behests of the brain,

> “ He licked his wife’s face, and crept into her dear familiar breasts,
enfolded her and sought the throat he knew so well. All who were there —
for they had friends with them — shuddered with honor. But she stroked
the sleek neck of the crested reptile, and all at once there were two snakes
there with intertwining coils, which after a little while glided away into
the woods near by. Now, as when they were human, they neither fear
men nor wound them and are gentle creatures, who still remember what
they were."

a6o BLACK LAMB AND GREY FALCON

there is no longer a stout fortress of bones, there is nothing but
a long, sliding, writhing sorrow. But what happened to
Cadmus was perhaps partly contrived by the presiding deity of
the coast, for he was the arch-enemy of Pan, since he invented
letters. He made human-kind eat of the tree of knowledge ; he
made joy and sorrow dangerous because he furnished the means
of commemorating them, that is to say of analysing them, of
being appalled by them.

That was not an end of the strange events on the coast.
We learn from St. Jerome’s Life of St. Hilarion that when
(in the fourth century) the holy man went to Epidaurus, which
was a town founded by the Greeks not far from here, he
found the whole district terrorised by a monster living in a
cave near by, who could draw peasants and shepherds to his
lair by his breath. It was certainly Cadmus ; literature has
always found readers. St. Hilarion went to the mouth of the
cave and made the sign of the cross and bade the dragon come
forth. It obeyed and followed the saint as meekly as might be
back to Epidaurus : all literature worth naming is an expression
of the desire to be saved. There the saint said to the towns-
people, “ Build a pyre " ; and when they had done that, he
said to the dragon, “ Lie down on that pyre.” It obeyed. The
townspeople set the pyre alight, and it lay quietly till it was
burned to ashes. Without doubt it was Cadmus, it was litera-
ture. It knew that it was not a dragon, it was a phoenix, and
would rise restored and young from its ashes ; it knew that
pagan literature was dying and Christian literature was being
born.

Since then Epidaurus has changed its name twice. It was
destroyed by the barbarians in the seventh century and its
population fled ten miles further north and founded Dubrovnik
or Ragusa. But after a time some stragglers returned to the
ruins of the sacked city and built another of a simpler sort,
which came to be known as Ragusa Vecchia. Now it is called
Tsavtat, which is said to be a Slavonic version of the word
“ civitas ”. We stopped there and found that the story about
St. Hilarion and the dragon was perfectly true. It cannot be
doubted. The town lies on a double-humped dromedary of a
peninsula, and the road can be seen where the dragon trotted
along behind the saint, looking as mild as milk but sustained by
its inner knowledge that not only was it to be reborn from the

DALMATIA

s6t

flames, but that those who kindled them were to know something
about death on their own account. It was aware that when we
visited the scene fifteen hundred years later we should be able to
see in our mind’s eye the tall villas which it passed on the way
to its martyrdom, and the elegant and serious people who held
their torches to the p3rre ; and it knew why. It knew that one
day the sailors and crofters would come to live among the ruins
of the town and would delve among the burnt and shattered villas
and take what they would of sculptures and bas-reliefs to build
up their cottage walls, where they can be seen to-day, flowers in
the buttonhole of poverty. It knew that the peasants’ spades
would one day attack a part of the peninsula which, in the
Greek town, had been the jewellers' quarter ; and that after-
wards intaglios on the hungry breasts and rough fingers of
people who had never known what it was to satisfy necessity,
would speak of a dead world of elegant and serious ladies and
gentlemen, otherwise sunk without trace. " Lie down,” St.
Hilarion was obliged to say to the dragon, " Lie down, and
stop laughing.”

Yet even that was not the last event to happen here as it
does nowhere else. Two seafaring families of this place became
rich and famous shipowners, and Just after the war a woman
who had been born into the one and had married into the other
conceived the desire that Mestrovitch should build a mausoleum
for herself, her father, her mother and her brother. She held
long discussions with the sculptor, and then she and her father
and her brother all died suddenly, for no very probable mediccd
reason ; and the mother had only time to make the final arrange-
ments for the execution of the plan before she joined them.
There is something splendid and Slav about this. They had
resolved to provoke an analysis of death by their own deaths,
and hastened to carry out their resolution.

Mestrovitch made the mausoleum in the form of a Chapel
of Our Lady of the Angels, standing among the cypresses in the
cemetery on one of the two summits of the peninsula. It is
characteristic of him in the uncertainty with which it gropes
after forms : there are some terrible errors, such as four boy
musician angels who recall the horrid Japaneseries of Aubrey
Beardsley. There is no getting over the troublesome facts that
the Turkish occupation sterilised South Slav art for five hundred
years, and that when it struggled back to creativeness it found

VOL. I S

262

BLACK LAMB AND GREY FALCON

itself separated by Philistine Austria from all the artistic achieve-
ments that the rest of Europe had been making in the meantime.
But there are moments in the Chapel which exquisitely illustrate
the theory, the only theory that renders the death of the in-
dividual not a source of intolerable grief : the theory that the
goodness of God stretches under human destiny like the net
below trapeze artists at the circus. The preservation offered
is not of a sort that humanity would dare to offer ; a father
would be lynched if he should do so badly for his son. Yet
to die, and to know a meaning in death, is a better destiny
than to be saved from dying. This discussion Mestrovitch
carries on not by literary suggestion, but as a sculptor should,
by use of form.

But this coast belongs to Pan. In this mausoleum Cadmus
goes too far, he delves into matters which the natural man would
forget and ignore, and he is punished. The sexton in charge
of this cemetery whose work it is to show visitors the tomb, is a
cheerful soul who has taken up mortuary interests as if they
were football or racing. He has himself tried his hand at
sculpture, and his carvings are all excruciating parodies of
Mestrovitch, criticisms which none of his enemies have ever
surpassed in venom; and, as every artist knows, there are
tortures which a dragon dreads far more than the pyre.

II. Perast

From Tsavtat the road goes inland and passes one of those
Dalmatian valleys which cannot be true, which are an obvious
Munchausen, in winter they are lakes, not swamps but deep
lakes, which can be swum and fished and rowed over in quite
sizable boats ; I have seen one as long as Derwentwater. In
spring an invisible presence pulls out a plug, and the water
runs away through the limestone and out to sea by miles of
subterranean passages, and instead of Derwentwater there is
dry and extremely cultivable land. Thereafter we came back
to the sea and the town of Hertseg Novi, where wistaria and fruit
blossoms and yellow roses frothed over the severely drawn
diagram of military works, to which the Bosnians and the Turks
and the Venetians and the Spaniards have all contributed in
their time. In the distance we saw, and did not visit because the
hour was wrong, the sixteenth-century monastery of St. Savina,

DALMATIA

*63

where King Alexander of Yugoslavia delivered to himself an in-
timation of his approaching death. He had visited it many times,
but when he went there just before he embarked for France, he
did not pull the rope that rings the bell to announce the coming
of a guest. He walked past it and rang the passing-bell.

It is to be noted that his very presence there is an indication
of some of the difficulties inherent in the State of Yugoslavia.
This was the first Orthodox monastery we had yet seen in the
whole of our journey through the country. The piety which
made him visit it could not have endeared him to his Catholic-
Croat subjects in the North and on the coast ; and they would
not have shared in the passionate interest he felt in the treasures
of this church, which comprise some holy objects in the pos-
session of the Nemanyas, the great dynasty that made the
Serbian Empire, because those emperors had no historical
association with them. Yet if the Karageorges had not been
sustained by the Orthodox Church and their pride in their
medieval past they could never have driven out the Turks or
defended themselves in the Great War or freed their fellow-
Slavs from the Austrian yoke. There are, as MetchnikoflF said,
disharmonies in nature, and probably the greatest of them is our
tendency to expect harmony in nature.

We ran along a coast that was pretty in a riverside way,
though it was edged with the intended cruelty of naval warfare,
with dockyards and out at sea the iron sharks of torpedo-boats
and submarines. But then it suddenly became lovely, we were
in the Bocca di Cattaro, the Boka Katorska, the winding natural
harbour, of which one has read all one’s life ; and like a Nor-
wegian fjord, it made an effect that was to the ordinary landscape
as ballet-dancing is to walking. The channel became wilder in
shape as it became milder in surface, it narrowed to a river and
widened to a bay, then flung itself away like a shawl and lay
cast down between rocks in an unpredictable line. Above us
the mountainside was cut with ledges where spring stands at
different stages, sometimes showing the clearest green of early
woodlands, laced with wild fhiit-blossom, sometimes only as the
finest haze over winter darkness of tree and soil ; and high above
all, pricking the roof of the sky at its full height, was the snow-
covered peak of Mount Lovchen. But to Norway there was
added here the special Dalmatian glory : a great deal of the coast
is edged with a line of Venetian Gothic palaces and churches.

««4 BLACK LAMB AND GREY FALCON

The channel drew to its narrowest. Here a King of Hungary
once closed it with a chain. We passed a waterfall, which,
according to the custom of this limestone country, burst straight
from the living rock, and came on Rishan, one of the oldest
inhabited towns in the world. It was the capital of old Illyria,
the seat of Queen Teiita. It is a little place that has had the
breath beaten out of its body, for it has been invaded again and
again since the time of the Goths onward, and has suffered also
earthquake. It is a grotesque fact that when the Crown Prince
Rudolf was taught Croat, the court chose as his tutor not a
learned professor from Vienna or Zagreb, or any of the cultivated
gentlemen to be found in the Dalmatian cities, but a country
squire from this town.^ Battered though it is, it keeps the
exquisite imprint of the coastal taste, and it has something
of the hardy quality of the town opposite Korchula where
the sea captains lived ; nets hang bronze over the golden and
lilac stone.

Perast, a few miles further along the fjord, is finer and
larger, with a surrealist touch added to its Venetian Gothic
charm. For beside the harbour an unfinished church, hardly
more than an open arch, stands in front of a large and com-
pletely finished church, in very curious relations to its campanile,
like one distracted before a superior, like Ophelia before the
queen ; and many of the palaces have been cleft asunder by
earthquakes, and are inhabited by Judas trees and fig trees
and poplars and wistaria vines, which are wildly contortionist,
hanging over a richly carved balustrade and forcing an entrance
back to the house through a traceried window a storey higher.
But Perast offers a touch of familiarity to the ear, and to the
eye. Its name comes once into the life of Peter the Great,
who, in the course of one of h'ls five-year plans, sent sixteen
young nobles here to go to sea with the local sea captains to
learn the art of navigation. The boys must have blinked at
the South, at the sea, at the discipline, all new to them. And
set in the bay are two islands, lying two or three hundred yards
out, both covered with low buildings, one bare of all but stone,
the other guarded by some cypresses. At the second every
visitor must feel a startled, baffled stirring of recognition which
afterwards they will probably repudiate.

• I was about to discover the reason for this from a Viennese historian
when the Anschluss came, and there was silence.

DALMATIA

265

But the recognition is right. This is the island on which
Arnold BScklin based his horrid vision of what happens to
Bubbles and His Majesty King Baby when the goblins get
them because they don't watch out : “ Die Toteninsel ”, the
Isle of Death. But the original is a curious contrast to the
picture. It is as if one met the reverse of a common experience,
it is like seeing a photograph which represents a woman as
bloated and painted, and finding that she is in fact a sunburned
young athlete. The island is a chaste, almost mathematical
arrangement of austerely shaped stones and trees. A boatman
rowed us out, and we found it the most proper and restrained
little Benedictine abbey of the twelfth century, ruined, but still
coherent. We walked about it for a little, and found some
stately tombstones that belonged, the boatman said, to the
families that lived in the palaces on the mainland, which we
could see lying on the shore and on the hillside among the
spring woods. The names on the tombs were all Slav, Venetian
though the place seemed to the eye.

But our boatman plainly wished us to make a move, he kept
on looking over his shoulder at the other island, and explaining
that the baroque church there was very beautiful, and that
many miracles had been performed in it. " He does not like
us being here," 1 said, ” perhaps there are snakes.” But when
we rowed to the other island we found he had wished to take us
to it simply because he lived there, and his dog had been weary-
ing for his company. He had been quite right in thinking this
important, for it was a unique animal. Its coat, which was of
drab tow, struck one as uncoiffed. Apparently dogs must pay
some attention to their toilet, since it could be seen at a glance
that this one paid none, being preoccupied with holy things.
It had fervent sherry-coloured eyes and was the very dog for a
miraculous shrine, for it had such a rich capacity for emotional
life that it could hardly have retained any critical sense of
evidence.

If this dog had a fault, it lay in giving to God's creatures too
much of the feelings that it should have reserved for the Creator.
It greeted the boatman who could not have been away from it for
more than half an hour, and offered us its friendship, as it might
have broken an alabaster box of ointment over our feet and
washed them with its hair. It had a baroque excessiveness,
perfectly matched to the place where it lived. This island is

266 BLACK LAMB AND GREY FALCON

artificial, banked up round a small rock, and it is covered with
a marble pavement, on which there stands a Renaissance
church, holy yet swelling its lines like the bosom of a well-
nourished female saint. There is a lovely and insane piece of
furniture, or masonry, left out on this pavement : a large marble
table, upheld by crouching giants. Inside, the church is lined
with some Italianate pictures, themselves passable, and set
against a background of some two thousand votive tablets,
worked in silver, an encyclopaedia of the silversmith’s art and
the moods of the pious. There is among them one large work
which is a masterpiece : it is a bas-relief showing the Turks
coming down the mountains to attack Perast and being driven
back. It is Renaissance work that has been preserved from its
own sins by the virility of the people who practised it.

As we left the dog promised to pray for our own salvation
and expressed its intention of lighting a candle before the altar
of Our Lady for the safety of its master during his journey to the
shore and back. I suggested that we should ease its emotional
strain by taking it in the boat with us, but this caused it great
distress, and even seemed to shock the boatman. I suppose it
had taken a vow not to leave the island. As we rowed away it
ran round in circles, barking wildly, its head down, while behind
it a totally superfluous archway, the curve of its span as sweet
as the drip of syrup from a spoon, framed the grey glass of the
sea by the shores of ancient Rishan. I blushed a little for the
dog’s abandonment, and was glad that no cat was by to sneer.
She must have been a thorn in the side of her spiritual adviser.

III. Kotor

There is a city named Dobrota, which is a string of Venetian
palaces and churches along the coast, four miles long. It is a
city, it is gloriously a city, for it was made so by the Republic
on account of its exploits in naval warfare against the Turks.
In one of its churches is the turban taken from Hadshi Ibrahim,
who fell at Piraeus by the swords of two soldiers from this parish.
And the place is not dead, though the earthquake struck here
also, and the stained purple of the Judas tree appears suddenly
between cleft walls. The Yugoslavian Navy and the liners
draw many of their crews from Dobrota. The sea gives these
places an unending life.

DALMATIA

267

In Kotor, too, there might be death. It was once a great
city. It was part of the great medieval Serbian Empire, and
after that was destroyed by the Turks it belonged to Hungary
and then to Venice, and became superbly rich. The route
from Dubrovnik to Constantinople ran through it, and it carried
on a caravan trade on its own account, which it combined with
sea trade to Italy. There are in the town thirty chapels built,
none meanly, by private families. But all this was stopped by
Napoleon’s attack on foreign trade. That, and the actual
fighting he brought down on this unoffending coast, destroyed
a gentle and eclectic culture. Later, the rule of Austria paralysed
any movement towards recovery. A great many of the mountain
tribes about here were irreconcilable, particularly on the hills
by Rishan, and Austria policed the coast with a persistent
nagging inefficiency that kept it poor and undeveloped and
sullen.

It lies at the fjord-head, pressed almost perpendicularly
against the barren foothills under the mountains which are
scaled by the famous road to Tsetinye ; and it is cooped up by
military fortifications. Always it is a little cold. The sun shines
on it only five hours a day in winter, and summer is not long
enough to correct the accumulated chill. A labyrinth of alleys
and handkerchief-wide squares leads from beauty to beauty.
There is a tenth-century cathedral, rough but with a fine front,
two towers joined by a portal that forms an arch. Inside there
is a doorway from a ninth-century church that stood on the
same site, which is superbly carved ; among a design of inter-
lacing strands, like our Celtic borders but of superior rhythm,
two devils snatch at two escaping souls ; all persons concerned
are violent but serene. There is a treasury, untidy as the jewel-
case of a rich woman who has become careless of such things
through age and trouble, still stuffed, in spite of Napoleon's
army and its requisitions : I have never seen such a show of
votive arms and legs made in silver, and there were some touch-
ing crosses that had been borne hither and thither in the long
wars between the Christians and the Turks. And there is a
Bishop’s palace beside it, with good capon lined, and grown
with climbing flowers.

Further on among the cold alleys there is a twelfth-century
Orthodox church. Here in Kotor there are many Orthodox.
It has a tiny separate church within its aisle, a box within a

x68 BLACK LAMB AND GREY FALCON

box, a magic within a magic. It reminded me of what I had
forgotten, the difference between the dark, hugged mystery of
the Eastern Church and the bold explanation proffered by the
lit altars of the Western Chtirch. Round an icy comer was a
Romanesque church built in the fourteenth century yet adorned
with the eagles of pagan Rome. Here there is the crucifix of a
suffering Christ, with a crown of real thorns and hair made of
shavings, which is ascribed to Michelangelo by a learned monk
of the seventeenth century, who must have been a great liar ; and
here one mounts some steps before a side altar and looks down
through glass on the Blessed Osanna, a Montenegrin saint who
died nearly four hundred years ago, but keeps about her rags
and tatters of skin and bones a look of excited and plaintive
sweetness. It is odd how Catholicism and Orthodoxy modify
the Slav character. In the Orthodox parts of Yugoslavia they
do not believe that it is the part of women to lead consecrated
lives though they should be pious, and there are very few
convents.

" Nothing ever happens in Kotor,” one would think. We
thought it proven by our guide’s insistence that on one day of
the year, in February, something does happen in Kotor. Then
the Guild of Sailors parades the streets in medieval costume,
bearing the weapons their ancestors used to fight the Turks, and
there is a ceremony at the cathedral, unique, and I believe not
strictly permissible, when the relics from the Treasury are laid
on the altar and are censed alternately by two leading citizens,
one Roman Catholic and one Orthodox. We are far from the
seats of authority here, and Slavs are individualist. ” Is it still
a great show ? " we asked doubtfully. “ Surely," said our guide.
“ W’e have lost our merchants, but we still have our sailors,
which is more important.”

It was an agreeable answer to hear from a man who was
wearing an overcoat so threadbare that it showed its weft. He
proved he meant it by taking us through the Town Gate to the
quay, and saying proudly, " Here are our sailors.” They were
walking in the pale evening sunshine, with the mountains
behind them curving over the ^ord like a blown wave : they
were indolent as highbred horses when they are not ridden, and
their faces were quietly drunken with stored energy, which they
would know how to release should they one day be at Piraeus,
and a pirate pass them wearing a turban. " If I had not been

DALMATIA *69

born in war-time, so that as a child I had many sicknesses,” said
the guide, " I too should have been a sailor."

IV. Home by Gruda

Our chauffeur was the son of a Swabian, which is to say a
German belonging to one of those families which were settled
by Maria Theresa on the lands round the Danube between
Budapest and Belgrade, because they had gone out of cultiva-
tion during the Turkish occupation and had to be recolonised.
His father had come to Dubrovnik before he was born, and he
‘ can never have known any other people but Slavs, yet quite
obviously Slavs struck him as odd and given to carrying on
about life to an excessive degree. He himself, particularly
when he spoke in English, attempted to correct the balance by
under-statement. Hence, when we approached the village of
Gruda, on our way from Dubrovnik to Kotor, he turned his
head and said, ” Nice people." He meant, it proved, that the
men and women of this district were undistinguishable in ap-
pearance from gods and goddesses. This was one of those
strange pockets one finds scattered here and there at vast in-
tervals in the universe, where beauty is the common lot.

" But why," the chauffeur was asking himself, " make a
fuss about that ? ” He put the question to himself with a kind
of stolid passion, when we passed through the village again on
our way home to Dubrovnik, and a group of three young girls,
lovely as primroses in a wood, came towards us, laughing and
stretching out their hands and crying out " Pennies, pennies,”
as if they were not only begging but were ridiculing the ideas
of beggary and benevolence alike. Since we were on the return
journey we knew we had time to waste, and hammered on the
glass and made the chauffeur stop. He slowed up under protest.
" They will beg,” he said. “ Why not ? ” said my husband.
They were, indeed, most prettily prepared to do so, for each of
them carried a little bouquet of flowers for an excuse.

“ Pennies, pennies 1 ” they cried, laughing, while we stared
at them and adored them. This was no case of a racial
tendency imposing itself on the mass, each germ-cell had made
an individual effort at beauty. One was black, one was chestnut,
one was ash-blonde ; they were alike only in their golden skins,
their fine eyebrows, their full yet neat mouths, the straightness

270

BLACK LAMB AND GREY FALCON

of their bodies within their heavy black woollen gowns. ** Have
you any pennies, my dear ? I have none,” said my husband,
hill of charitable concern. “ Not one,” I answered, and I
turned to the chauffeur. “ Give me three tenpenny pieces,”
I said. “ Three tenpenny pieces I ” he exclaimed very slowly.
“ But you must not give them three tenpenny pieces. Three
tenpenny pieces 1 It is very wrong. They should not beg at all.
Begging is disgraceful. And even if it were excusable, three
tenpenny pieces is far too much.”

There was much to be said for his point of view. Indeed,
he was entirely right and we were wrong. But they were so
beautiful, and in spite of their beauty they would be poor all
their lives long, and that is an injustice I never can bear. It is
the flat violation of a promise. Women are told from the day
they are born that they must be beautiful, and if they are ugly
everything is withheld from them, and the reason why scarcely
disguised. It follows therefore that women who are beautiful
should want for nothing. “ Please, I would like to give it to
them,” I besought the chauffeur, “ just three tenpenny pieces ;
it’s not much for us English with the exchange as it is.”

He did not answer me at once. His nature, which was so
profoundly respectful of all social institutions, made him hate
to refuse anything to an employer. At last he said, " I have
only one tenpenny piece on me.” As I took it we both knew
that we both knew that he lied. Glumly he started the engine
again, while the lovely girls stood and laughed and waved good-
bye to us, a light rain falling on them, the wet road shining at
their feet, the creamy foam of the tamarisk on the bank behind
them lighter in the dusk than it is in the day, but the yellow broom
darker. “ I wonder how old those girls were,” said my husband,
a few miles further on. “ Let’s ask the chauffeur. Since he’s a
native he ought to know.” The chauffeur answered, “ They
were perhaps fifteen or sixteen. And if they are encouraged to
be impudent when they are so young, what will they be like
when they are old ? ”

Dubrovnik II

The day after our expedition we went to see the Treasury
of the Cathedral. This is now fairly easy, though it can be

DALMATIA

271

seen only once or twice a week at a fixed hour ; it is typical of
the stagnancy which covered Dalmatia under Austrian rule
that before the war it was hardly to be visited, since the clergy
took it for granted in that darkened world that a traveller was
more likely to be a thief than a sightseer. A visit still takes
time, for Dalmatians, like Croatians, sometimes find that
difficulty about being at a particular place at a particular hour
for a particular purpose which they believe to be characteristic
of the Serb. With a crowd of fellow-tourists we sat about for
half an hour or more after the prescribed moment, in the great
baroque Cathedral, a creamy, handsome, worldly building.
Then a priest, not old but already presenting a very prominent
stomach, came in with the keys and took us through the safe-
doors into the Treasury, which is divided down the middle by a
low spiked barrier. We waited in a line along this, while the
priest went behind it and opened a large number of the cup-
boards which lined the room from floor to ceiling. He took
from them object after object and brought them over to us,
carrying them slowly along the barrier so that each of us could
see them in detail.

Some of these objects were very beautiful, notably a famous
reliquary containing the head of St. Blaise, which is the shape
of a skull-cap six inches high and six inches across, and is
studded with twenty-four enamel plaques of eleventh-century
Byzantine work, austere and intense portraits of the saints.
There were some other good Byzantine and Serbo-Byzantine
pieces, which the priest seemed to reckon as less interesting
than the numerous examples of commonplace Renaissance work
in the Treasury. Though the Catholic priests in Croatia and
Dalmatia are pleasant and well-mannered they have none of
that natural taste and aptitude for connoisseurship which are
often found in quite simple priests in France and Italy. This
one, indeed, felt little tenderness towards the arts. He showed
us presently a modern crucifix, highly naturalist but very
restrained and touching, which had been made by a young man
of the town in his early twenties ; and when the stout Swiss
woman beside me asked if the sculptor had fulfilled his promise,
he replied, " Ah, no, he died at twenty-four of drink. It’s
always so, with these artists.” ” Yes, indeed ! ” agreed the
Swiss, and they shrugged their shoulders and nodded darkly,
preening their flabbiness in superiority over a race who must

273 BLACK LAMB AND GREY FALCON

necessarily follow a discipline stricter than they could ever have
imagined.

But these people believed themselves to be lovers of the arts ;
presently the priest brought from the cupboards an object
which he dandled and beamed upon while he showed it to the
spectators, who responded by making the noise that is evoked
by the set-piece of a firework display. I stretched my necK
but could see nothing more than a silver object, confused in
form and broken in surface. When it came to the Swiss woman
I could see that it was a basin and ewer which are mentioned in
many guide-books as the pearl of this collection. They are
said to have been left by a certain Archbishop to his nephew
in 1470, but a blind and idiot cow could tell at once that they
are not so. Such disgraces came later.

Nothing could be more offensive to the eye, the touch or to
common sense. The basin is strewn inside with extremely
realistic fem-leaves and shells, among which are equally
realistic eels, lizards and snails, all enamelled in their natural
colours. It has the infinite elaborateness of eczema, and to add
the last touch of unpleasantness these animals are loosely fixed
to the basin so that they may wobble and give an illusion of
movement. Though Dubrovnik is beautiful, and this object
was indescribably ugly, my dislike of the second explained to
me why I felt doubtful in my appreciation of the first. The town
regarded this horror as a masterpiece. That is to say they
admired fake art, naturalist art, which copies nature without
interpreting it ; which believes that to copy is all we can and
need do to nature, which is not conscious that we live in an un-
comprehended tmiverse, and that it is urgently necessary for
sensitive men to look at each phenomenon in turn and find
out what it is and what are its relations to the rest of existence.
They were unaware of our need for information, they believed
that all is known and that on this final knowledge complete
and binding rules can be laid down for the guidance of human
thought and behaviour. This belief is the snare prepared for
the utter damnation of man, for if he accepts it he dies like a
brute, in ignorance, and therefore without a step made towards
salvation ; but it is built into the walls of Dubrovnik, it is the
keystone of every arch, the well in every cloister. They sur-
rounded themselves with real art, the art that moves patiently
towards discovery and union with reality, because to buy the

DALMATIA

*73

best was their policy, and they often actually bought the best.
But they themselves pretended that they had arrived before
they had started, that appearances are reality. That is why
Dubrovnik, lovely as it is, gives the effect of hunger and thirst.

But the priest assumed* that I would wish to look long on the
basin, and bent towards me over the barricade to put it as close
to me as possible ; and I learned how far worse than aesthetic
pain the vulgarer physical sort can be. My right hand was
transfixed with agony. I had rested it on the top of one of the
spikes in the barricade, and now it was being impaled on the
spike by the steady pressure of the priest’s immense stomach. I
uttered an exclamation, which he took for a sign of intense
appreciation evoked by his beautiful basin, and with a benevolent
smile he leant still closer, so that I could see the detestable
detail more plainly. His stomach came down more heavily
on my hand, and my agony mounted to torment. I tried to
attract his attention to what was happening by spreading out
my fingers and twitching them, but this seemed to make no
impression whatsoever on the firm rubbery paunch that was
pressing upon them.

This filled me with wonder. It was odd to arrive at middle
age and find that one had been wrong about much that one had
believed about human anatomy. I tried to speak, but the only
words that came into my mind came in an incorrect form which
I immediately recognised and rejected. " Ton ventre, dein
Bauch, il tuo ventre, tvoy drob, I must not say that,” I told
myself, “ I must say votre ventre, Ihr Bauch, il suo ventre,
vash drob.” But at that it still seemed an odd thing to say
to a priest before a crowd of people. I found myself, in fact,
quite unable to say it, even though I taunted myself with dis-
playing, too late in life, something like the delicacy which made
Virginia refuse to swim with Paul from the shipwreck, because
she was ashamed of her nudity. I uttered instead a low moan.
The priest, certain now that I was a person of extreme sensibility,
swayed backwards and then forwards. My husband, even more
certain on that point, dug me savagely in the ribs. I uttered a
piercing scream.

The priest recoiled, and seemed about to drop the basin,
but my pleasure was mitigated by the fear that my husband
was going to strangle me. I held out my hand, which was
bleeding freely from a wound in the palm. “ Ah, pardon 1 ”

BLACK LAMB AND GREY FALCON

*74

said the priest, coming forward bowing and smiling. He
was taking it lightly, I thought, considering the importance
which is ascribed to like injuries when suffered by the saints.
“ But, my dear, what was it ? ” asked my husband. " The
priest's stomach pressed my hand down on the spike,” I said
feebly. “ It can’t have done ! ” exclaimed my husband, " he
would have felt it 1 ” " No," I said, “ about that we were both
wrong.” “ What was it ? ” asked the Swiss woman beside me.
“ It was the priest’s stomach,” I said, imprudently perhaps,
but I was beginning to feel very faint.

She looked at me closely, then turned to her husband. He
like everybody else in the room except the priest, who had
returned to his cupboards, had his eyes fixed on me. I heard
her say, “ She says it was the priest’s stomach.” He looked at
me under knitted eyebrows, and when he was nudged by his
neighbour I heard him answer the enquiry by repeating, “ She
says it was the priest’s stomach.” I heard that neighbour echo
incredulously what he had been told, and then I saw him turn
aside and hand it on to his own neighbour. Though the priest
came back with the ewer which was the companion to the
basin and fully as horrible, containing a bobbing bunch of silver
and enamelled grasses, he was never able to collect the attention
of his audience again, for they were repeating among them-
selves, in all their several languages, ” She says it was the priest’s
stomach.” It seemed unfair that this should make them look
not at the priest but at me. " Let us go,” 1 said.

Out in the open air I leaned against a pillar and, shaking
my hand about to get rid of the pain, I asked my husband if
he did not think that there was something characteristic of
Dubrovnik, and dishonourable to it, in the importance it
ascribed to the basin and the ewer : and we discussed what was
perhaps the false finality of the town. But as we spoke we heard
from somewhere close by the sound of bagpipes, and though
we did not stop talking we began to move in search of the player.
" But the Republic worked,” my husband said, ” you cannot
deny that the Republic worked.” “ Yes," I agreed, " it worked.”
The music drew us across the market-place, which lies just
behind the Cathedral, a fine irregular space surrounded by
palaces with a robust shop-keeping touch to them, with a
flight of steps rising towards the seaward wall of the town,
where baroque domes touch the skyline. There were some

DALMATIA

a7S

fiercely handsome peasants in the dark Dalmatian costume sitting
with their farm produce at their feet, and some had heard the
bagpipes too and were making off to find them. We followed
these, and found a crowd standing outside a building with a
vaulted roof, that looked as if in the past it had formed part
of some ambitious architectural scheme, perhaps a passage-
way between two state offices. Now it seemed to be used as a
stable, for there was horse’s dung on the floor ; but that would
not explain why there was an upturned barrel on the floor,
with a penny bottle of ink and a very large scarlet quill-pen
lying on a sheet of newspaper spread over the top. Just inside
the open doors stood a very 'old man, dressed in the gold-
braided coat and full black trousers of a Bosnian, playing
bagpipes that were made of nicely carved pearwood and faded
blue cloth. He had put the homespun satchel all peasants caiTy
down on the floor ; the place did not belong to him. He played
very gravely, his brow contorted as if he were inventing the
curious Eastern line of his melody, and his audience listened as
gravely, following each turn of that line.

" Look at them,” I said ; “ they are Slavs, they believe
that the next Messiah may be born at any minute, not of any
woman, for that is too obvious a generation, but of any im-
personal parent, any incident, any thought. I like them for
that faith, and that is why I do not like Dubrovnik, for it is an
entirely Slav city, yet it has lost that faith and pretends that
there shall be no more Messiahs.” ” But wait a minute,” said
my husband ; “ look at these people. They are all very poor.
They are probably the descendants of the workers, the lowest
class of the Republic. That means that they have never
exercised power. Do you not think that they may owe to that
very fact this faith which you admire, this mystical expectation
of a continuous revelation that shall bring man nearer to reality,
stage by stage, till there is a consummation which will make
all previous stages of knowledge seem folly and ignorance ?
The other people in Dubrovnik had to exercise power, they
had to take the responsibility. Perhaps none can do that unless
he is sustained by the belief that he knows all that is to be
known, and therefore cannot make any grave mistake. Perhaps
this mystical faith is among the sacrifices they make, like their
leisure and lightheartedness, in order to do the rest of us the
service of governing us.”

276 BLACK LAMB AND GREY FALCON

" Then it should be admitted that governors are inferior to
those whom they govern,” I said, “ for it is the truth that we
are not yet acquainted with reality and should spend our lives
in search of it.” " But perhaps you cannot get people to take
the responsibility of exercising power unless you persuade the
community to flatter them,” said my husband, " nor does it
matter whether the governed are said to be lower or higher than
their governors if they have such faces as we see in the crowd,
if wisdom can be counted to dwell with the oppressed.” " But
they are hungry,” I said, “ and in the past they were often
tortured and ill-used." “ It is the price they had to pay for the
moral superiority of the governed,” said my husband, " just as
lack of mystical faith is the price the governors have to pay for
their morally unassailable position as providers of order for the
community. I think, my dear, that you hate Dubrovnik because
it poses so many questions that neither you nor anybody else
can answer.”

1 HERZEGOVINA

^w''^^'^sr'W''W''W''iisr'

Trehinye

A LL tourists at Dubrovnik go on Wednesdays or Satur-
Z_A days to the market at Trebinye. It is over the border
Z Ain Herzegovina, and it was under a Turkish governor
until the Bosnians and Herzegovinian rebels took it and had
their prize snatched from them by the Austrians in 1878. It
is the nearest town to the Dalmatian coast which exhibits what
life was like for the Slavs who were conquered by the Turks.
The route follows the Tsavtat road for a time, along the slopes
that carry their olive terraces and cypress groves and tiny fields
down to the sea with the order of an English garden. Then it
strikes left and mounts to a gorgeous bleakness, golden with
broom and gorse, then to sheer bleakness, sometimes furrowed
by valleys which keep in their very trough a walled field, pre-
serving what could not be called even a dell, but rather a
dimple, of cultivable earth. On such bare rock the suihmer
sun must be a hypnotic horror. We were to learn as we mounted
that a rainstorm was there a searching, threshing assault.

When the sky cleared we found ourselves slipping down the
side of a broad and fertile valley, that lay voluptuously under
the guard of a closed circle of mountains, the plump grey-green
body of a substantial river running its whole length between
poplars and birches. We saw the town suddenly in a parting
between showers, handsome and couchant, and like all Turkish
towns green with trees and refined by the minarets of many
mosques. These are among the most pleasing architectural
gestures ever made by urbanity. They do not publicly declare
the relationship of man to God like a Christian tower or spire.
They raise a white finger and say only, “ This is a community

VOL. I 277 T

afj% BLACK LAMB AND GREY FALCON

of human beings and, look you, we are not beasts of the field "■
I looked up at the mountain and wondered which gully had
seen the military exploits of my admired Jeanne Merkus.

That, now, was a girl : one of the most engaging figures
in the margin of the nineteenth century, sad proof of what
happens to Jeanne d’Arc if she is unlucky enough not to be
burned. She was born in 1839, in Batavia, her father being
Viceroy of the Dutch East Indies. Her mother came of a
clerical Walloon family, and was the divorced wife of a professor
in Leyden University. Jeanne was sixth in the family of four
boys and four girls. When she was five her father died, and she
was brought home to Holland, where she lived with her mother
at Amsterdam and The Hague until she was nine. Then her
mother died and she went to live with an uncle, a clergyman,
who made her into a passionate mystic, entranced in expectation
of the second coming of Christ.

It happened that when she was twenty-one she inherited a
fortune far larger than falls to the lot of most mystics. Her
peculiar faith told her exactly what to do with it. She went to
Palestine, bought the best plot of ground she could find near
Jerusalem, and built a villa for the use of Christ. She lived
there for fifteen years, in perpetual expectation of her divine
guest, and conceiving as a result of her daily life a bitter hatred
against the Turks.

When she heard of the Bosnian revolt she packed up and
went to the Balkans, and joined the rebels. She came in
contact with Lyubibratitch, the Herzegovinian chief, and at
once' joined the forces in the field, attaching herself to a party of
comitadji led by a French officer. We have little information
as to where she fought, for very little has been written, and
nothing in detail, about this important and shameful episode of
European history. We have an account of her, one winter’s
night, struggling single-handed to fire a mine to blow up a
Turkish fortress among the mountains when all the rest of her
troop had taken to their heels, and failing because the dynamite
had frozen. It is almost our only glimpse of her as a campaigner.

Jeanne’s more important work lay in the outlay of her
fortune, which she spent to the last penny in buying Krupp
munitions for the rebels. But as soon as the revolt was a proven
success the Austrians came in and took over the country, and
in the course of the invasion she was captured. She was set

HERZEGOVINA

279

free and allowed to live in Dubrovnik, but she eluded the
authorities and escaped over the mountains to Belgrade, where
she enlisted in the Serbian Army. There the whole population
held a torchlight serenade under her window, and she appeared
on the balcony with a round Montenegrin cap on her fair hair.

But there was to be no more fighting. The action of the
great powers had perpetuated an abuse that was not to be
corrected, till thirty-five years later, and then at irreparable cost
to civilisation, in the Balkan wars and the first World War.
There was nothing for Jeanne to do, and she had no money to
contribute to the nationalist Balkan funds. The Turks had
seized the house in Jerusalem which she had prepared for
Christ, and, not unnaturally, would pay her no compensation.
We find her moving to the French Riviera, where she lived in
poverty. Sometimes she went back to Holland to see her
family, who regarded her visits with shame and repugnance,
because she talked of her outlandish adventures, wore strange
comitadji-cum-deaconess clothes, smoked big black cigars, and
was still a believing Christian of a too ecstatic sort. It is said
that once or twice she spoke of her lost spiritual causes before
young kinsfolk, who followed them for the rest of their lives.
The relatives who remained insensible to her charm carried
their insensibility to the extreme degree of letting her live on
Church charity at Utrecht for the last years of her life, though
they themselves were wealthy. When she died in 1897 they did
not pay for her funeral, and afterwards they effaced all records
of her existence within their power.

It is important to note that nothing evil was known of
Jeanne Merkus. Her purity was never doubted. But she never
achieved martyrdom, and the people for whom she offered up
her life and possessions were poor and without influence. She
therefore, by a series of actions which would have brought her
the most supreme honour had she acted in an important Western
state as a member of the Roman Catholic Church in the right
century, earned a rather ridiculous notoriety that puts her in
the class of a pioneer bicyclist or Mrs. Bloomer.

We passed certain coarse cliffs with lawns between which
were once Austrian barracks. “ Now I remember something I
was told about this place,” I said. What was that ? ” asked
my husband. “ Nothing, nothing," I said. “ I will tell you
later.” “ Look, you can see that the Austrians were here,”

a8o BLACK LAMB AND GREY FALCON

said my husband ; " there are chestnut trees everywhere."
*' Yes, there’s been a lot of coffee with Schlagobers drunk under
these trees," I said as we got out of the car at the market-place.
We were walking away when our Serbian chauffeur called to us,
" You had better take this man as a guide." This surprised
us, for we had come only to see the peasants in their costumes,
and any interesting mosques we could find, and the guide was
a miserable little creature who looked quite unable to judge
what was of interest and what was not. " Is it necessary ? "
asked my husband. " No," admitted the chauffeur unhappily,
but added, " This is, however, a very honest man and he speaks
German, and it will cost you only tenpence.” He mentioned
the sum with a certain cold emphasis, evidently recalling the
scene with the three lovely girls of Gruda.

But he was, I think, reacting to the complicated racial
situation of Yugoslavia. He was a Swab, and had lived out his
life among the Croatians and Dalmatians ; and all such Slavs
who had never known the misery of Turkish rule harbour an
extremely unhappy feeling about the fellow-Slavs of Bosnia and
Herzegovina and Macedonia, who have so often suffered a real
degradation under their Turkish masters. It is as if the North
and East of England and the South Coast were as they are now,
and the rest of our country was inhabited by people who had
been ground down for centuries by a foreign oppressor to the
level of the poor white trash of the Southern States or South
Africa. Were this so, a man from Brighton might feel acutely
embarrassed if he had to take a Frenchman to Bath and admit
that the ragged illiterates he saw there were also Englishmen.
Different people, of course, show this embarrassment in different
ways. If they are the hating kind they quite simply hate their
unpresentable relatives. But this chauffeur was a gentle and
scrupulous being, and he settled the matter by regarding them as
fit objects to be raised up by charity. Doubtless he would give
somebody here his mite before he left ; and he felt this to a
good opportunity to direct to a useful channel the disposition
to wastefulness which he had deplored at Gruda.

The guide turned out to be as we had thought him. It was
a poor day for the market. A storm had been raging over the
mountains all night, and as the year was stiJJ early and the crops
light, most of the peasants had not thought it worth while to
get up at dawn and walk the seven or eight miles to Trebinye.

HERZEGOVINA

aSi

There were a few handsome women standing with some
vegetables before them, soberly handsome in the same vein as
their plain round caps and their dark gathered dresses, gripped
by plain belts. We saw a tourist level a camera at two of these.
They turned away without haste, without interrupting their
grave gossip, and showed the lens their backs. These were very
definitely country women. They wore the typical peasant shoes
of plaited thongs, and by their movements it could be seen
that they were used to walking many miles and they bore
themselves as if each wore a heavy invisible crown, which
meant, I think, an unending burden of responsibility and
fatigue. Yet there were women among them who were to
these as they were to town ladies, country women from a
remoter country. The eyes of these others were mild yet wild,
like the eyes of yoked cattle, their skin rougher with worse
weather than the others had seen and harsher struggles with it ;
and their bodies were ignorant not only of elegance but of
neatness, in thick serge coats which were embroidered in designs
of great beauty but were coarse in execution, if coarse is used
not in the sense of vulgarity but to suggest the archaic, not to
say the prehistoric. There was a difference among the men
also. Some seemed sturdy and steadfast as the rock, others
seemed the rock itself, insensitive, except to the weathering
power of the frost and sun.

There were also about the market-place plenty of Moslems,
the men wearing the red fez, the women in the black veil and the
overall made of a straight wide piece of cotton pulled in at the
waist by a drawstring. " Turks,” said the guide, and he was
talking nonsense. Nearly all the Moslems in Yugoslavia except
in the extreme south, in Macedonia, are Slavs whose ancestors
were converted by the Turks, sometimes in order to keep their
properties, sometimes because they were Bogomil heretics and
wanted defence against Roman Catholic persecution. This is
pre-eminently the case in Bosnia and Herzegovina ; the true
Turks left at the time of the Austrian occupation. " Look ! ”
said my husband, and I found that he was enraptured at the
sight of the fezes and the veils, for though he had spent some
time in Istanbul and Ankara, that had been since the days of
the Ataturk and his reforms. ” Do you think the veil adds
charm to the female ? ” I asked. “ Yes, in a way,” he answered ;
" they all look like little Aberdeen terriers dressed up to do tricks,

z9» BLACK LAMB AND GREY FALCON

with those black muzzles sticking out." One stopped, and
offered to sell him some white silk handkerchiefs of offensive
aspect, with tatting at the comers. His taste in linen is classical ;
she was not fortunate. Nor were any of the six others who
sought to sell him such handkerchiefs at various points in
Trebinye. “ I don’t like their handkerchiefs and I don’t like
them,’’ he decided. " No doubt they’re perfectly respectable,
but they waggle themselves behind all this concealment with a
Naughty Nineties sort of sexuality that reminds me of Ally
Sloper and the girls, and the old Romano, and the Pink 'Un
and the Pelican.”

This was not the last we were to see of that peculiar quality.
After our guide had so far exhausted the possibilities of Trebinye
that he was driven to taking us down a street to see a boot-shop
and saying reverently, “ Batya," we decided we would go back
to Dubrovnik. But we changed our minds because a little
Moslem boy handed us a leaflet which announced that tourists
could visit an old Turkish house in the town, formerly the home
of a famous pasha, which was complete with its original furniture
and its original library. We found it in the suburbs, standing
among gardens where spring was touching off the lilac bushes
and the plum trees ; a house perhaps a hundred or a hundred
and fifty years old. It was a very pleasing example of the
Turkish genius for building light and airy country houses that
come second only to the work of our own Georgians, and in
some ways are superior, since they hold no dark corners, no
mean holes for the servants, no rooms too large to heat.

This stood firm and bright and decent, with its projecting
upper storeys, the windows latticed where the harem had been,
and its two lower storeys that had their defended Arabian
Nights air of goods made fast against robbers. Across a country-
ish courtyard, almost a farmyard, was the servants’ house,
where the kitchens and stables were. Down an outer staircase
ran a pretty, smiling girl of about sixteen, unveiled but wearing
trousers, which here (though not in other parts of Yugoslavia)
are worn only by Moslem women. Behind her came an elderly
man wearing a fez and a brocade frock-coat. On seeing us
the girl broke into welcoming smiles, too profuse for any social
circle that recognised any restrictions whatsoever, and left us
with a musical comedy gesture. Her trousers were bright pink.
" Turkish girl,” said the man in the frock-coat, in German.

HERZEGOVINA

aSa

“ Then why is she unveiled ? ” asked my husband. “ She is
too young,” said the man in the frock-coat, his voice plump
to bursting with implications.

We wavered, our faces turning back to Trebinye. " Come
in, come in,” cried the man in the frock-coat, placing himself
between us and Trebinye. " I will show you all, old Turkish
house, where the great pasha kept his harem, all very fine.”
He drove us up the stairs, and shepherded us through the main
door into a little room, which in its day had been agreeable
enough. Pointing at the latticed windows he said richly, " The
harem was here, beautiful Turkish women wearing the beautiful
Turkish clothes.” He opened a cupboard and took out a col-
lection of clothes such as may be found in any old-clothes shop
in those provinces of Yugoslavia that were formerly occupied
by the Turks. “ Very fine, all done by hand,” he said of the
gold-braided jackets and embroidered bodices. ” And look,
trousers 1 ” He held up before us a garment of white lawn,
folded at the ankle into flashy gold cuffs, which can never have
been worn by any lady engaged in regular private harem work.
" Transparent,” he said. It was evident that he was affected
by a glad pruritis of the mind. Coyly he sprang to another
cupboard and brought out a mattress. “ The bed was never
left in the room,” he said ; ” they took it out when it was
needed.” There was unluckily a third cupboard, with a tiled
floor and a ewer. ” This was the bathroom, here is where the
Turkish lady kept herself clean, all Turkish ladies were very
clean and sweet.” He assumed a voluptuous expression, cocked
a hip forward and put a hand on it, lifted the ewer upside-down
over his head, and held the pose.

Undeterred by our coldness, he ran on to the next room,
which was the typical living-room of a Turkish house, bare of
all furniture save a bench running along the walls and an otto-
man table or two, and ornamented by rugs nailed flat to the
wall. 1 exclaimed in pleasure, for the view from its window
was exquisite. The grey-green river we had seen frem the
heights above the city ran here through meadows deep in long
grasses and pale flowers, and turned a mill-wheel ; and the first
leaves of the silver birches on its brink were as cool to the eye
as its waters. Along this river there must once have wandered, if
there is any truth in Oriental miniatures, a young prince wearing
an ospreyed fez and embroidered garments, very good-looking

>84 BLACK LAMB AND GREY FALCON

now though later he would be too fat, carrying a falcon on his
wrist and snugly composing a poem about the misery of his love.

“ I should be obliged,” said the man in the frock-coat, " if
the well-bom lady would kindly pay some attention to me.
Surely she could look at the view afterwards.” ” Shall I throw
him downstairs ? ” asked my husband. “ No," 1 said, “ I find
him enchantingly himself.” It was interesting to see what kind
of person would have organised my life had I been unfortunate
enough, or indeed attractive enough, to become the inmate of
a brothel. So we obeyed him when he sharply demanded that
we should sit on the floor, and listened while he described what
the service of a formal Turkish dinner was like, betraying his
kind with every word, for he took it for granted that we should
find all its habits grotesque, and that our point of view was the
proper one. ” And now,” he said, rising and giving a mechani-
cal leer at my ankles as I scrambled off the floor, ” I shall show
you the harem. There are Turkish girls, beautiful Turkish
girls.”

At a window in the passage he paused and pointed out an
observation post in the roof of the servants' house. ” A eunuch
used to sit there to see who came into the house,” he said. " A
eunuch,” he repeated, with a sense of luxuriance highly inap.
propriate to the word. He then flung open a door so that we
looked into a room and saw three girls who turned towards us,
affected horror and shielded their faces with one hand while
with the other they groped frantically but inefhciently for some
coloured handkerchiefs that were lying on a table beside them.
Meanwhile the custodian had also affected horror and banged
the door. “ By God, it is the Pink 'Un and the Pelican,” said
my husband. Then the custodian knocked on the door with an
air of exaggerated care, and after waiting for a summons he
slowly led us in. " Typical beautiful Turkish girls,” he said.
They were not. Instead of wearing the black veil that hides the
whole face, which almost all Yugoslavian Moslems wear, they
wore such handkerchiefs as Christian peasant women use to
cover their hair, but knotted untidily at the back of the head so
that their brows and eyes were bare. " Now they are cultivating
our beautiful Turkish crafts,” he explained. They were not.
Turkish embroidery and weaving are indeed delicious ; but two
of these wenches held in their hands handkerchiefs of the
offensive sort that my husband had rejected in the market-place.

HERZEGOVINA

aSs

and the third was sitting at a loom on which a carpet which
ought never to have been begun had been a quarter finished.

After we had contemplated them for some time, while they
wriggled on their seats and tittered to express a reaction to my
husband which both he and I, for our different reasons, thought
qmte unsuitable, the custodian said, “ Now, we will leave the
ladies by themselves," and, nodding lecherously at me, led my
husband out of the room. I found this disconcerting but sup-
posed he had taken my husband away to show him some
beautiful Turkish " feelthy peectures ”, in which case they
would be back soon enough. As soon as we were alone the
girls took off their veils and showed that they were not ill-
looking, though they were extremely spotty and had an in-
ordinate number of gold teeth. They suggested that I should
buy some of the offensive handkerchiefs, but I refused. I meant
to ask my husband to give them some money when he came back.

To pass the time I went over to the girl at the loom and
stood beside her, looking down on her hands, as if I wanted to
see how a carpet was made. But she did nothing, and suddenly
I realised she was angry and embarrassed. She did not know
how to weave a carpet any more than I do ; and the girls with
the handkerchiefs did not know how to sew, they were merely
holding them with threaded needles stuck in them. They all
began to laugh very loudly and exchange bitter remarks, and
I reflected how sad it is that slight knowledge of a foreign
tongue lets one in not at the front door but at the back. I have
heard poems recited and sermons preached in the Serbian
language which were said to be masterpieces by those who were
in a position to judge, and I have been unable to understand one
word. But I was able to grasp clearly most of what these young
women were saying about me, my husband, my father and my
mother.

The scene was horrible, because they looked not only
truculent, but unhappy. They were ashamed because I had
detected that they could not sew or weave, for the only women
in the Balkans who cannot handle a needle or a loom are the
poorest of the urban population, who are poorer than any
peasant, and cannot get hold of cloth or thread because they
have no sheep. The scene was pitiful in itself, and it was
pitiful in its implications, if one thought of the fair-mannered
and decent Moslem men and women in Trebinye and all over

s86 BLACK LAMB AND GREY FALCON

Yugoslavia, sad because they knew themselves dead and buried
in their lifetime, coffined in the shell of a perished empire, whose
ways these poor wretches were aping and defiling. 1 could not
bear to wait there any longer, so I left them and walked through
the house, calling for my husband. The search became dis-
agreeable, for I opened the door of one or two rooms, and found
them full of trunks and bundles lying on the bare floor, stuffed
with objects but open and unfastened, as if someone here had
meditated flight and then given up the plan on finding that the
catastrophe which he had hoped to escape was universal.

I called louder, and he answered me from a room by the
main door. “ What did he take you away for ? ” I asked. “ He
didn’t take me away for anything but to give you the thrilling
experience of seeing those wenches unveiled,” said my husband.
The custodian came forward and said, “ I have been showing
your husband these beautiful Turkish books ; they have been
in this house for many centuries.” He thrust into my hand a
battered copy of the Koran, which fell open at a page bearing
a little round label printed with some words in the Cyrillic
script. ” Oh, Lord 1 oh. Lord ! ” I said. “ This is the stamp of
a Sarajevo second-hand book-shop.” ” Really, this is all too
bloody silly,” said my husband ; ” it is like charades played
by idiot ghosts round their tombs in a cemetery.” We went
out into the courtyard, followed by the custodian, who seemed
at last to realise that we were not pleased by his entertainment.
*' Do they speak Serbian or not ? ” he asked our guide. " No,
I don’t think so,” he was answered. He looked puzzled and
decided to assume that life as he knew it was continuing in its
usual course. So he gave us the Turkish greeting by raising
his hand to his forehead, exposing that national custom to our
patronage or derision, he did not care which it was so long as
we tipped him, and he said, ” Now you have met a Turkish
gentleman and seen how all Turkish gentlemen used to live.”
My husband gave him money, and we walked away very
quickly. The guide said, " Were you pleased with the visit 7
It is interesting, is it not 7 ” My husband asked, " Who is
that man 7 ” “ He used to be the servant of the owner of the
house,” said the guide. “ Who is the owner 7 ” my husband
asked. " He is a Moslem baron,” said the guide. " Once his
family was very rich, now he is very poor. He furnished this
house and put his servant in charge of it, and I think the money

HERZEGOVINA 387

he gets from it is nearly all that he has. He lives far out in the
country, where it is very cheap.” .

When we were driving out of the town I said, “ I hate the
corpses of empires, they stink as nothing else. They stink so
badly that I cannot believe that even in life they were healthy.”
“ I do not think you can convince mankind,” said my husband,
" that there is not a certain magnificence about a great empire
in being." “ Of course there is,” I admitted, “ but the hideous-
ness outweighs the beauty. You are not, I hope, going to tell
me that they impose law on lawless people. Elmpires live by
the violation of law." Below us now lay the huge Austrian-
built barracks, with the paddocks between them, and I re-
membered again what I had hated to speak of as we drove into
Trebinye, when we were out to have an amusing morning. Here
the Herzegovinians had found that one empire is very like another,
that Austria was no better than Turkey. Between these barracks
the Austrian Empire killed eighty people for causes that would
have been recognised on no statute book framed by man since
the beginning of time.

When the news came in 1914 that the Archduke Franz
Ferdinand and his wife had been assassinated by Serb patriots
at Sarajevo, the Austrian authorities throughout Bosnia and
Herzegovina arrested all the peasants whom they knew to be
anti-Austrian in sentiment and imprisoned some and hanged
the rest. There was no attempt at finding out whether they
had been connected with the assassins, as, in fact, none of them
were. Down there on the grass between the barracks the
Austrians took as contribution from Trebinye seventy Serbs,
including three women, such women as we saw in the market-
place. Someone I met in Sarajevo on my first visit to Yugoslavia
had had a relative killed there, and had kept photographs of
the slaughter which the Yugoslavian Government had found
among the Austrian police records. They showed the essential
injustice of hanging ; the hanged look grotesque, they are not
allowed the dignity that belongs to the crucified, although they
are enduring as harsh a destiny. The women looked particularly
grotesque, with their full skirts; they looked like ikons, as
Constantine had said Slav women should look when dancing.
Most of them wore an expression of astonishment. I remember
one priest who was being led through a double line of gibbets
to his own ; he looked not horrified but simply surprised. That

a88 BLACK LAMB AND GREY FALCON

indeed was natural enough, for surprise must have been the
predominant emotion of most of the victims. They cannot have
expected the crime, for though it was known to a large number
of people these were to be found only in a few towns, far away
from Trebinye : and when they heard of it they can never have
dreamed that they would be connected with it.

" The scene was a typical illustration of the hypocrisy of
empires, which pretend to be strong and yet are so weak that
they constantly have to defend themselves by destroying
individuals of the most pitiable weakness,” I said. ” But an
empire," my husband reminded me, “ can perform certain
actions which a single nation never can. The Turks might have
stayed for ever in Europe if it had not been for the same com-
bination of forces known as the Austrian Empire.” “ But
there was no need for them to combine once the Turks were
beaten,” I objected ; ” in the nineteenth century the Turks
were hopelessly beaten, and the Porte was falling to pieces
under the world’s eye, yet the Austrians were flogging their
peoples to keep them in subjection exactly as if there were a
terrifying enemy at their gates.” “ Yes, but by that time there
were the Russians,” said my husband. " Yes, but Czarist
Russia was a rotten state that nobody need have feared,” I
said. “ That, oddly enough, is something that no nation ever
knows about another,” said my husband ; " it appears to be
quite impossible for any nation to discover with any accuracy
the state of preparedness for war in another nation. In the
last war both Great Britain and Serbia were grossly deceived
by their ideas of what support they were going to receive from
Russia ; and Germany was just as grossly deceived by her
ally Austria, who turned out to be as weak as water.” " But
how absurd the behaviour of nations is I ” I exclaimed. " If I
ran about compelling people to suffer endless inconveniences by
joining with me in a defensive alliance against someone who
might conceivably injure me, and never took proper steps to
find out if my companions were strong enough to aid me or my
enemies strong enough to injure me, I would be considered to
be making a fool of myself.” " But the rules that apply to
individuals do not apply to nations,” said my husband ; “ the
situation is quite different.” And indeed I suppose that I was
being, in my female way, an idiot, an excessively private person,
like the nurse in the clinic who could not understand my agita-

HERZEGOVINA

289

tion about the assassination of King Alexander of Yugoslavia.
But it is just to admit that my husband was indulging his male
bent in regard to intemation^ affairs, and was being a lunatic.

When we were well on our way back to our hotel at Gruzh,
past Dubrovnik and among the lovely terraced gardens of its
suburb Larpad, my husband said, “ When we were in that
idiot house at Trebinye, which was like Hamlet without the
Prince of Denmark, a brothel with the sexual intercourse left
out, I could not help thinking of that poor chap we came on in
that farm over there.” We had a night or two before walked
up to the top of Petka, a pine-covered hill at the edge of the sea,
and after seeing the best of the sunset had strolled over the
olive groves towards Dubrovnik and dinner. We had missed
our path and when the dark fell we were wandering in an
orchard beside a farm, obviously very old, and so strongly built
that it had a fortress air. The place bore many touches of decay,
and the steps between the terraces crumbled under our feet ;
we took one path and it led us to a lone sheep in a pen, the
other brought us to a shut wooden door in a cavern-mouth.
We felt our way back to the still mass of the farm, and we heard
from an open window the rise and fall of two clear voices,
speaking in a rhythm that suggested a sense of style, that
recognised the need for restraint, and within that limit could
practise the limitless freedom of wit. Both of us assumed that
there were living in this house people who would certainly be
cosmopolitan and polyglot, perhaps ruined nobles of Dubrovnik,
or a family from Zagreb who had found a perfect holiday villa.

We knocked confidently at the door, and prepared to ask
the way in German. But the door was opened by a man wearing
peasant costume and a fez, and behind the light of an oil-lamp
hung on a wall shone down on a room paved with flagstones,
in which a few sacks and barrels lay about in a disorder that
suggested not so much carelessness as depression. At the back
of the room sat a woman who gracefully turned away her head
and put up her hand to hide her face, with a gesture that we
were later to see parodied and profaned by the girls in the
Turkish house at Trebinye. The man was a tall darkness to us,
and he remained quite still when my husband spoke to him in
German and Italian. Then I asked him in my bad Serbian
how we might get to Dubrovnik, and he told me slowly and
courteously that we must go round the comer of the house

290 BLACK LAMB AND GREY FALCON

and follow a landward wall. Then I said " Sbogom,” which
means " With God ” and is the Serbian good-bye. He echoed it
with the least possible touch of irony, and I perceived I had
spoken the word with the wrong accent, with a long lift on the
first syllable instead of a short fall.

We moved away in the darkness, turned the angle of the
house, and found a cobbled path beside the wall. As we stood
there a door in the house behind us suddenly opened, and there
stood the tall man again. “ Good ! ” he said, and shut the
door. It had been done ostensibly to see that we were on the
right path, but really it had been done to startle us, as a child
might have done it. It was as if this man who was in his body
completely male, completely adult, a true Slav, but had the
characteristic fire and chevaleresque manners of the Moslem,
had not enough material to work on in this half-ruined farm,
and had receded into childishness of a sort one can dimly
remember. As one used to sit in the loft and look down on the
people passing in the village street, and think, " They can’t see
me. I’m sitting here and looking at them and they don’t know
it ; if I threw an apple at their feet they wouldn’t guess where it
came from,” so he, this tall man sitting in this fortress, had told
himself, ” They won’t know there is a door there, they will be
startled when I open it,” and the empty evening had passed a
little quicker for the game.

I said, looking down the slopes towards the sea, " It was
odd a Moslem should be living there. But it is a place that has
only recently been resettled. Until the Great War this district
was largely left as it was after it had been devastated in the
Napoleonic wars. Ah, what a disgusting story that is I See,
all day long we have seen evidences of the crimes and follies of
empires, and here is evidence of how murderous and imbecile a
man can become when he is possessed by the Imperial idea.”
" Yes,” said my husband, “ the end of Dubrovnik is one of the
worst of stories.”

When France and Russia started fighting after the peace
of Pressburg in 1805 Dubrovnik found itself in a pincer between
the two armies. The Republic had developed a genius for
neutrality throughout the ages, but this was a situation which
no negotiation could resolve. The Russians were in Montenegro,'
and the French were well south of Split. At this point Count
Caboga proposed that the inhabitants of Dubrovnik should ask

HERZEGOVINA

a9>

the Sultan to grant them Turkish nationality and to allow them
to settle on a Greek island where they would carry on their tradi-
tions. The plan was abandoned, because Napoleon’s promises
of handsome treatment induced them to open their gates. This
meant their commercial ruin, for the time, at least, since after
that ships from Dubrovnik were laid under an embargo in the
ports of all countries which were at war with France. It
also meant that the Russian and Montenegrin armies invaded
their territory and sacked and burned all the summer palaces
in the exquisite suburbs of Larpad and Gruzh, hammering
down the wrought-iron gates and marble terraces, beating to
earth the rose gardens and oleander groves and orchards, firing
the houses themselves and the treasures their owners had ac-
cumulated in the last thousand years from the best of East and
West. The Russians and Montenegrins acted with special
fervour because they believed, owing to a time-lag in popular
communication and ignorance of geography, that they were thus
defending Christianity against the atheism of the French
Revolution.

When Napoleon was victorious the inhabitants of Dubrovnik
expected that since they had been his allies they would be com-
pensated for the disasters the alliance had brought on them.
But he sent Marshal Marmont to read a decree to the Senate
in the Rector's Palace, and its first article declared : “ The
Republic of Ragusa has ceased to exist ”. This action shows
that Napoleon was not, as is sometimes pretended, morally
superior to the dictators of to-day. It was an act of Judas.
He had won the support of Dubrovnik by promising to recognise
its independence. He had proclaimed when he founded the
Illyrian provinces that the cause of Slav liberation was dear to
him ; he now annulled the only independent Slav community
in Balkan territory. He defended his wars and aggressions on
the gp-ound that he desired to make Europe stable ; but when
he found a masterpiece of stability under his hand he threw it
away and stamped it into the mud.

There is no redeeming feature in this betrayal. Napoleon
gave the Republic nothing in exchange for its independence.
He abolished its constitution, which turned against him the
nobles, from whom he should have drawn his administrators,
as the Venetians had always done in the other Adriatic cities.
Hence, unadvised, he committed blunder after blunder in

392 BLACK LAMB AND GREY FALCON

Dalmatia. In a hasty effort at reform he repealed the law that
a peasant could never own his land but held it as a hereditary
tenant, and therefore could never sell it. In this poverty-
stricken land this was a catastrophe, for thereafter a peasant’s
land could be seized for debt. He also applied to the territory
the Concordat he had bullied Pius VII into signing, which
bribed the Church into becoming an agent of French imperialism,
and caused a passionately devout population to feel that its
faith was being tampered with for political purposes. This last
decree was not made more popular because its execution Wcis in
the hands of a civil governor, one Dandolo, a Venetian who
was not a member of the patrician family of that name, but the
descendant of a Jew who had had a Dandolo as a sponsor at his
baptism and had, as was the custom of the time, adopted his
name. These errors, combined with the brutal indifference
which discouraged Marmont’s efforts to develop the country,
make it impossible to believe that Napoleon was a genius in
1808. Yet without doubt he was a genius till the turn of the
century. It would seem that Empire degrades those it uplifts
as much as those it holds down in subjection.

Road

Because there was a wire from Constantine announcing
that he would arrive at Sarajevo the next day, we had to leave
Dubrovnik, although it was raining so extravagantly that we
saw only little vignettes of the road. An Irish friend went with
us part of the way, for we were able to drop him at a farmhouse
fifteen miles or so along the coast, where he was lodging.
Sometimes he made us jump from the car and peer at a marvel
through the downward streams. So we saw the source of the
Ombla, which is a real jaw-dropping wonder, a river-mouth
without any river. It is one of the outlets of the grey-green
waters we had seen running through Trebinye, which suddenly
disappear into the earth near that town and reach here after
twenty miles of uncharted adventure under the limestone.
There is a cliff and a green tree, and between them a gush
of water. It stops below a bridge and becomes instantly, with-
out a minute's preparation, a river as wide as the Thames at
Kingston, which flows gloriously out to sea between a marge
of palaces and churches standing among trees and flowers, in a

HERZEGOVINA 293

scene sumptuously, incredibly, operatically romantic.

Our sightseeing made us dripping wet, and we were glad
to take shelter for a minute or two in our friend’s lodgings and
warm ourselves at the fire and meet his very agreeable landlady.
While we were there two of her friends dropped in, a man from
a village high up on the hills, a woman from a nearer village
a good deal lower down the slopes. They had called to pay
their respects after the funeral of the landlady’s aunt, which
had happened a few days before. Our Irish friend told us that
the interment had seemed very strange to his eyes, because
wood is so scarce and dear there that the old lady had had no
coffin at all, and had been bundled up in the best table-cloth.
But because stone is so cheap the family vault which received
her was like a ducal mausoleum. The man from the upland
village went away first, and as the landlady took him out to
the door our Irish friend said to the woman from the foothills
" He seems very nice.” “ Do you think so ? ” said the woman
Her nose seemed literally to turn up. ” Well, don’t you ? "
asked our friend. “ We-e-e-ell,” said the woman, “ round about
here we don’t care much for people from that village,” “ Why
not ? ” asked our friend. “ We-e-e-ell, for one thing, you some-
times go up there and you smell cabbage soup, and you say,
‘ That smells good,’ and they say, ‘ Oh, we’re just having
cabbage soup.’ ” A pause fell, and our friend enquired, ” Then
don’t they offer you any ? ” " Oh, yes.” " And isn’t it good ? ”
" It’s very good. But, you see, we grow cabbages down here
and they can’t up there, and they never buy any from us, and
we’re always missing ours. So, really, we don’t know what
to think.”

Mostar

I was so wearied by the rushing rain that I slept, and woke
again in a different country. Our road ran on a ledge between
the bare mountains and one of these strange valleys that are
wide lakes in winter and dry land by summer. This, in spite of
the rain, was draining itself, and trees and hedges floated in a
mirror patterned with their own reflections and the rich earth
that was starting to thrust itself up through the thinning waters
We came past a great tobacco factory to Metkovitch, a river
port like any other, with sea-going ships lying up by the quay,

VOL. I i;

294 BLACK LAMB AND GRBT FALCON

looking too big for their quarters. There we stopped in the hotel
for some coffee, and for the first time recognised the fly-blown,
dusty, waking dream atmosphere that lingers in Balkan districts
where the Turk has been. In this hotel I found the most west-
ward Turkish lavatory I have ever encountered : a hole in the
floor with a depression for a foot on each side of it, and a tap
that sends water flowing along a groove laid with some relevance
to the business in hand. It is efficient enough in a cleanly kept
household, but it is disconcerting in its proof that there is more
than one way of doing absolutely anything.

Later we travelled in a rough Scottish country, where people
walked under crashing rain, unbowed by it. They wore rain-
coats of black fleeces or thickly woven grasses, a kind of thatch ;
and some had great hoods of stiffened white linen, that made a
narrow alcove for the head and a broad alcove for the shoulders
and hung nearly to the waist. These last looked like inquisitors
robed for solemn mischief, but none of them were dour. The
women and girls were full of laughter, and ran from the mud
our wheels threw at them as if it were a game. Moslem grave-
yards began to preach their lesson of indifference to the dead.
The stone stumps, carved with a turban if the commemorated
corpse were male and left plain if it were female, stood crooked
among the long grasses and the wild irises, which the rain was
beating flat. Under a broken Roman arch crouched an old
shepherd, shielding his turban, which, being yellow, showed that
he had made the pilgrimage to Mecca.

The rain lifted, we were following a broad upland valley
and looked over pastures and a broad river at the elegance of
a small Moslem town,’ with its lovely minarets. It was ex-
quisitely planned, its towers refined by the influence of the
minarets, its red-roofed houses lying among the plumy foliage
of their walled gardens ; it was in no way remarkable, there are
thousands of Moslem towns like it. We left it unvisited, and
went on past an aerodrome with its hangars, past the barracks
and the tobacco factory that stand in the outskirts of any con-
siderable Herzegovinian town, and were in Mostar, “ Stari
most ”, old bridge Presently we were looking at that bridge,
which is falsely said to have been built by the Emperor Trajan,
but is of medieval Turkish workmanship. It is one of the most
beautiful bridges in the world. A slender arch lies between two
round towers, its parapet bent in a shallow angle in the centre.

HERZEGOVINA

*95

To look at it is good ; to stand on it is as good. Over the
grey-green river swoop hundreds of swallows, and on the banks
mosques and white houses stand among glades of trees and
bushes. The swallows and the glades know nothing of the
mosques and houses. The river might be running through
unvisited hills instead of a town of twenty thousand inhabitants.
There was not an old tin, not a rag of paper to be seen. This
was certainly not due to any scavenging service. In the Balkans
people are more apt to sit down and look at disorder and discuss
its essence than clear it away. It was more likely to be due to
the Moslem’s love of nature, especially of running water, which
would prevent him from desecrating the scene with litter in the
first place. I marvelled, as I had done on my previous visit to
Yugoslavia, at the contradictory attitudes of the Moslem to such
matters.

They build beautiful towns and villages. I know of no
country, not even Italy or Spain, where each house in a group
will be placed with such invariable taste and such pleasing
results for those who look at it and out of it alike. The archi-
tectural formula of a Turkish house, with its reticent defensive
lower storey and its projecting upper storey, full of windows,
is simple and sensible ; and I know nothing neater than its
interior. Western housewifery is sluttish compared to that
aseptic order. Yet Mostar, till the Austrians came, had no
hotels except bug-ridden shacks, and it was hard to get the
Moslems to abandon their habit of casually slaughtering animals
in the streets. Even now the average Moslem shop is the anti-
thesis of the Moslem house. It is a shabby little hole, often
with a glassless front, which must be cold in winter and stifling
in summer, and its goods are arranged in fantastic disorder. In a
stationer’s shop the picture-postcards will have been left in the
sun till they are faded, and the exercise-books will be foxed. In
a textile shop the bolts of stuff will be stacked in untidy tottering
ing heaps. The only exceptions are the bakeries, where the flat
loaves and buns are arranged in charming geometric patterns,
and the greengroceries, where there is manifest pleasure in the
colour and shape of the vegetables. There are indeed, evident
in all Moslem life coequal strains of extreme fastidiousness and
extreme slovenliness, and it is impossible to predict where or
why the one or the other is going to take control. A mosque
is the most spick and span place of worship in the world ; but'

296 BLACK LAMB AND GREY FALCON

any attempt to postulate a connection in the Moslem mind
between holiness and cleanliness will break down at the first
sight of a mosque which for some reason, perhaps a shifting of
the population, is no longer used. It will have been allowed to
fall into a squalor that recalls the worst Western slums.

The huge caf6 of our hotel covered the whole ground floor,
and had two billiard-tables in the centre. For dinner we ate the
trout of the place, which is famous and, we thought, horrible,
like fish crossed with slug. But we ate also a superb cheese
souffle. The meal was served with incredible delay, and between
the courses we read the newspapers and looked about us.
Moslems came in from the streets, exotic in fezes. They hung
them up and went to their seats and played draughts and drank
black coffee, no longer Moslems, merely men. Young officers
moved rhythmically through the beams of white light that
poured down upon the acid green of the billiard-tables, and the
billiard balls gave out their sound of stoical shock. There was
immanent the Balkan feeling of a shiftless yet just doom. It
seemed possible that someone might come into the room, per-
haps a man who would hang up his fez, and explain, in terms
just comprehensible enough to make it certain they were not
nonsensical, that all the people at the tables must stay there
until the two officers who were playing billiards at that moment
had played a million games, and that by the result their eternal
fates would be decided ; and that this would be accepted, and
people would sit there quietly waiting and reading the news-
papers.

Here in Mostar the really adventurous part of our journey
began. Something that had been present in every breath we drew
in Dalmatia and Croatia was absent when we woke the next
morning, and dressed and breakfasted with our eyes on the
market square beneath our windows. It might be identified
as conformity in custom as well as creed. The people we were
watching adhered with intensity to certain faiths. They were
Moslem, they were Catholic, they were Orthodox. About
marriage, about birth, about death, they practise immutable
rites, determined by these faiths and the older faiths that lie
behind them. But in all other ways they were highly in-
dividualistic. Their goings and comings, their eating and
drinking, were timed by no communal programme, their choice
of destiny might be made on grounds so private as to mean

HERZEGOVINA

897

nothing to any other human being. Such an attitude showed
itself in the crowds below us in a free motion that is the very
antithesis in spirit to what we see when we watch people walk-
ing to their work over London Bridge in the morning. It
showed too in their faces, which always spoke of thought that
was never fully shared, of scepticism and satire and lyricism
that felt no deed to have been yet finally judged.

It showed itself also in their dress. Neither here nor any-
where else do single individuals dare while sane to dress en-
tirely according to their whim ; and the Moslems keep to their
veils and fezes with a special punctilio, because these mark
them out as participants in the former grandeur of the Ottoman
Empire. But here the smallest village or, in a town, a suburb *
or even a street, can have its own fantasy of costume. The men
go in less for variations than the women, for in the classic
costume of these parts the male has found as becoming a dress
as has ever been devised for him. The stiff braided jacket has
a look of ceremony, of mastership about it, and the trousers
give the outer line of the leg from the hip to the ankle and make
it seem longer by bagging between the thighs. But the women
presented us with uncountable variations. We liked two
women, grey-haired and harsh-featured, who looked like Mar-
gate landladies discussing the ingenious austerities of the day’s
menus, until a boy wheeled away a barrow and we could see
their long full serge bloomers. Other women wore tight bodices
and jackets and bagg^ trousers, each garment made of a
different sort of printed material, such as we use for country
curtains ; but though these wore the Moslem trousers they
were Christians, for their faces were unveiled, and they covered
their heads loosely with what we know as Paisley shawls.
The Moslems slid about black-muzzled, wearing their cotton
wrappers, which were usually striped in coldish colours, greys
and slate-blues and substanceless reds, except for those who
wore that costume one sees in Mostar and not again when one
leaves it, unless one’s journey takes one very far : to Turkestan,

I have heard it said.

The costume is as stirring to the imagination and as idiotic-
ally unpractical as any I have ever seen. The great point in
favour of Moslem dress in its Yugoslavian form is a convenience
in hot weather, which in these parts is a serious consideration,
for even in Mostar the summer is an affliction. The cotton

298 BLACK LAMB AND GREY FALCON

overall keeps the hair and the clothes clean, and the veil pro-
tects the face from dust and insects and sunburn. This is not
true of the heavy horse-hair veil worn in the real East, where
the accumulation of dust is turned by the breath of the mouth
and nostrils to actual mud, but the light black veil of voile or
cotton does no harm and a great deal of good. There is, however,
no such justification for the traditional Mostar costume. It con-
sists of a man’s coat, made in black or blue cloth, immensely
too large for the woman who is going to wear it. It is cut with
a stiff military collar, very high, perhaps as much as eight or
ten inches, which is embroidered inside, not outside, with gold
thread. It is never worn as a coat. The woman slips it over
*her, drawing the shoulders above her head, so that the stiff
collar falls forward and projects in front of her like a vizor, and
she can hide her face if she clutches the edges together, so that
she need not wear a veil. The sleeves are allowed to hang loose
or are stitched together at the back, but nothing can be done
with the skirts, which drag on the ground.

We asked the people in the hotel and several tradesmen in
Mostar, and a number of Moslems in other places, whether
there was any local legend which accounted for this extra-
ordinary garment, for it seemed it must commemorate some
occasion when a woman had disguised herself in her husband's
coat in order to perform an act of valour. But if there was
ever such a legend it hcis been forgotten. The costume may
have some value as a badge of class, for it could be worn with
comfort and cleanliness only by a woman of the leisured classes,
who need not go out save when she chooses. It would be most
inconvenient in wet weather or on rough ground, and a woman
could not carry or lead a child while she was wearing it. But
perhaps it survives chiefly by its poetic value, by its symbolic
references to the sex it clothes.

It has the power of a dream or a work of art that has several
interpretations, that explains several aspects of reality at one
and the same time. First and most obviously the little woman
in the tall man’s coat presents the contrast between man and
woman at its most simple and playful, as the contrast between
heaviness and lightness, between coarseness and fragility,
between that which breaks and that which might be broken
but is instead preserved and cherished, for the sake of tenderness
and joy. It makes man and woman seem as father and daughter.

HERZEGOVINA

zgg

The little girl is wearing her father’s coat and laughs at him
from the depths of it, she pretends that it is a magic garment
and that she is invisible and can hide from him. Its dimensions
favour this fantasy. The Herzegovinian is tall, but not such a
giant as this coat was made to fit. I am barely five-foot-four and
my husband is close on six-foot-two, but when I tried on his
overcoat in this fashion the hem was well above my ankles ;
yet the Mostar garment trails about its wearer’s feet.

But it presents the female also in a more sinister light ;
as the male sees her when he fears her. The dark vizor gives
her the beak of a bird of prey, and the flash of gold thread
within the collar suggests private and ensnaring delights. A
torch is put to those fires of the imagination which need for
fuel dreams of pain, annihilation and pleasure. The austere
yet lubricious beauty of the coat gives a special and terrifying
emphasis to the meaning inherent in all these Eastern styles of
costume which hide women’s faces. That meaning does not
relate directly to sexual matters ; it springs from a state of mind
more impersonal, even metaphysical, though primitive enough
to be sickening. The veil perpetuates and renews a moment
when man, being in league with death, like all creatures that
must die, hated his kind for living and transmitting life, and
hated woman more than himself, because she is the instrument
of birth, and put his hand to the floor to find filth and plastered
it on her face, to aflront the breath of life in her nostrils. There
is about all veiled women a sense of melancholy quite incom-
mensurate with the inconveniences they themselves may be
suffering. Even when, like the women of Mostar, they seem
to be hastening towards secret and luxurious and humorous love-
making, they hint of a general surrender to mortality, a futile
attempt of the living to renounce life.

BOSNIA .

Road

A MOSLEM woman walking black-faced in white robes
among the terraces of a blossoming orchard, her arms
kfull of irises, was the last we saw of the Herzegovinian
plains ; and our road took us into mountains, at hrst so gruffly
barren, so coarsely rocky that they were almost squalid. Then
we followed a lovely rushing river, and the heights were miti-
gated by spring woods, reddish here with the foliage of young
oaks, that ran up to snow peaks. This river received tributaries
after the astonishing custom of this limestone country, as un-
polluted gifts straight from the rock face. One strong flood
burst into the river at right angles, flush with the surface, an
astonishing disturbance. Over the boulders ranged the exuber-
ant hellebore with its pale-green flowers.

But soon the country softened, and the mountains were
tamed and bridled by their woodlands and posed as background
to sweet small compositions of waterfalls, fruit trees and green
lawns. The expression " sylvan dell ” seemed again to mean
something. We looked across a valley to Yablanitsa, the Town
of Poplars, which was the pleasure resort of Mostar when the
Austrians were here, where their offlcers went in the heat of the
summer for a little gambling and horse-racing. Before its
minarets was a plateau covered with fields of young corn in
their first pale, strong green, vibrant as a high C from a celestial
soprano, and orchards white with cherry and plum. We drove
up an avenue of bronze and gold budding ash trees, and lovely
children dashed out of a school and saluted us as a sign and
wonder. We saw other lovely children later, outside a gipsy
encampment of tents made with extreme simplicity of pieces

300

COSTUME OF MOSTAR

THE ARCHDUKE FRANZ FERDINAND AND SOPHIE CHOTEK PROBABLY
LEAVING THE HOTEL HOSNA AT ILIDZHE TO DRIVE TO THE TOWN
HALL. SARAJEVO, 2Sth JUNE 1914, FOR THE CIVIC RECEPTION
In front of the Archduke sits General Potiorek, Go\-crnor of Bosnia

BOSNIA

301

of black canvas hung over a bar and tethered to the ground on
each side. Our Swabian chauffeur drove at a pace incredible
for him, lest we should give them pennies.

A neat village called Little Horse ran like a looped whip
round a bridged valley, and we wondered to see in the heart
of the country so many urban-looking little caf^s where men
sat and drank coffee. The road mounted and spring ran back-
wards like a reversed him, we were among trees that had not
yet put out a bud, and from a high pass we looked back at a
tremendous circle of snow peaks about whose feet we had run
unwitting. We fell again through Swissish country, between
banks blonde with primroses, into richer country full of stranger
people. Gipsies, supple and golden creatures whom the window-
curtains of Golders Green had clothed in the colours of the
sunrise and the sunset, gave us greetings and laughter ; Moslem
women walking unveiled towards the road turned their backs
until we passed, or if there was a wall near by sought it and
flattened their faces against it. We came to a wide valley,
flanked with hills that, according to the curious conformation,
run not east and west nor north and south but in all directions,
so that the view changed every instant and the earth seemed as
fluid and restless as the ocean.

“ We are quite near Sarajevo,” I said ; ” it is at the end of
this valley.” Though I was right, we did not arrive there for
some time. The main road was under repair and we had to
make a detour along a road so bad that the mud spouted
higher than the car, and after a mile or so our faces and top-
coats were covered with it. This is really an undeveloped
country, one cannot come and go yet as one chooses.

Sareg'evo I

" Look,” I said, “ the river at Sarajevo runs red. That I
think a bit too much. The pathetic fallacy really ought not to
play with such painful matters." " Yes, it is as blatant as a
propagandist poster,” said my husband. We were standing on
the bridge over which the Archduke Franz Ferdinand and his wife
would have driven on the morning of June the twenty-eighth,
1914, if they had not been shot by a Bosnian named Gavrilo
Princip, just as their car was turning off the embankment.

303 BLACK LAMB AND GREY FALCON

We shuddered and crossed to the other bank, where there
was a little park with a caf£ in it. We sat and drank coffee,
looking at the Pyrus Japonica and the white lilacs, that grew all
round us, and the people, who were almost as decorative as
flowers. At the next table sat a Moslem woman wearing a
silk overall striped in lilac and purple and dull blue. Her long
narrow hand shot out of its folds to spoon a drop from a glass
of water into her coffee-cup ; here there is Turkish coffee, which
carries its grounds in suspension, and the cold drop precipitates
them. Her hand shot out again to hold her veil just high enough
to let her other hand carry the cup to her lips. When she was
not drinking she sat quite still, the light breeze pressing her
black veil against her features. Her stillness was more than the
habit of a Western woman, yet the uncovering of her mouth and
chin had shown her completely un-Oriental, as luminously fair
as any Scandinavian. Further away two Moslem men sat on a
bench and talked politics, beating with their fingers on the
headlines of a newspaper. Both were tall, raw-boned, bronze-
haired, with eyes crackling with sheer blueness : Danish sea
captains, perhaps, had they not been wearing the fez.

We noted then, and were to note it again and again as we
went about the city, that such sights gave it a special appearance.
The costumes which we regard as the distinguishing badge
of an Oriental race, proof positive that the European frontier
has been crossed, are worn by people far less Oriental in aspect
than, say, the Latins ; and this makes Sarajevo look like a
fancy-dress ball. There is also an air of immense luxury about
the town, of unwavering dedication to pleasure, which makes
it credible that it would hold a festivity on so extensive and
costly a scale. This air is, strictly speaking, a deception, since
Sarajevo is stuffed with poverty of a most denuded kind. The
standard of living among the working classes is lower than even
in our great Western cities. But there is also a solid foundation
of moderate wealth. The Moslems here scorned trade but they
were landowners, and their descendants hold the remnants of
their fortunes and are now functionaries and professional men.
The trade they rejected fell into the hands of the Christians, who
therefore grew in the towns to be a wealthy and privileged class,
completely out of touch with the oppressed Christian peasants
outside the city walls. There is also a Jewish colony here,
descended from a group who came here from Spain after the

BOSNIA

303

expulsory decrees of Ferdinand and Isabella, and grafted itself
on an older group which had been in the Balkans from time
immemorial ; it has acquired wealth and culture. So the town
lies full-fed in the trough by the red river, and rises up the bowl
of the blunt-ended valley in happy, open suburbs where hand-
some houses stand among their fruit trees. There one may live
very pleasantly, looking down on the minarets of the hundred
mosques of Sarajevo, and the tall poplars that march the
course of the red-running river. The dead here also make
for handsomeness, for acres and acres above these suburbs are
given up to the deliberate carelessness of the Moslem cemeteries,
where the marble posts stick slantwise among uncorrected grass
and flowers and ferns, which grow as cheerfully as in any other
meadow.

But the air of luxury in Sarajevo has less to do with material
goods than with the people. They greet delight here with
unreluctant and sturdy appreciation, they are even prudent
about it, they will let no drop of pleasure run to waste. It is
good to wear red and gold and blue and green : the women wear
them, and in the Moslem bazaar that covers several acres of the
town with its open-fronted shops, there are handkerchiefs and
shawls and printed stuff's which say “ 'Yes ” to the idea of
brightness as only the very rich, who can go to dressmakers
who are conscious specialists in the eccentric, dare to say it in
the 'Western world. Men wash in the marble fountain of the
great mosque facing the bazaar and at the appointed hour
prostrate themselves in prayer, with the most comfortable
enjoyment of coolness and repose and the performance of a
routine in good repute. In the Moslem cookshops they sell
the great cartwheel tarts made of fat leaf-thin pastry stuffed
with spinach which presuppose that no man will be ashamed of
his greed and his liking for grease. The looks the men cast on
the veiled women, the gait by which the women admit that they
know they are being looked upon, speak of a romanticism that
can take its time to dream and resolve because it is the flower
of the satisfied flesh. This tradition of tranquil sensuality is of
Moslem origin, and is perhaps still strongest among Moslems,
but also on Jewish and Christian faces can there be recognised
this steady light, which makes it seem as if the Puritans who
banish pleasure and libertines who savage her do worse than
we had imagined. We had thought of them as destroying harm-

304

BLACK LAMB AND GREY FALCON

less beauty: but here we learned to suspect that they throw
away an instruction necessary for the mastery of life.

Though Sarajevo has so strong a character it is not old as
cities go. It was originally a mining town. Up on the heights
there is to be seen a Turkish fortress, reconditioned by the
Austrians, and behind it are the old workings of a mine that
was once exploited by merchants from Dubrovnik. This is not
to say that it had ever any of the casual and reckless character
of a modern mining town. In past ages, before it was realised
that though minerals seem solid enough their habits make them
not more reliable as supports than the rainbow, a mining town
would be as sober and confident as any other town built on a
hopeful industry. But it was neither big nor powerful when it
fell into the hands of the Turks in 1464. The capital of Bosnia
was Yaitse, usually but unhelpfully spelt Jajce, about ninety
miles or so north in the mountains. But after the conquest
Sarajevo became extremely important as a focal point where
various human characteristics were demonstrated, one of which
was purely a local peculiarity, yet was powerful and appalling
on the grandest scale.

It happened that the Manichaean heresy, which had touched
Dalmatia and left its mark so deeply on Trogir, had struck even
deeper roots in Bosnia, where a sect called the Bogomils had
attracted a vast proportion of the people, including both the feudal
lords and the peasants. We do not know much about this sect
except from their enemies, who were often blatant liars. It is
thought from the name “ Bogomil ”, which means “ God have
mercy ” in old Slavonic, and from the behaviour of the surviving
remnants of the sect, that they practised the habit of ecstatic
prayer, which comes easy to all Slavs ; and they adapted the dual-
ism of this heresy to Slav taste. They rejected its Puritanism and
incorporated in it a number of pre-Christian beliefs and customs,
including such superstitions as the belief in the haunting of
certain places by elemental spirits and the practice of gathering
herbs at certain times and using them with incantations. They
also gave it a Slav character by introducing a political factor.
Modern historians suggest that Bogomilism was not so much a
heresy as a schism, that it represented the attempt of a strong
national party to form a local church which should be inde-
pendent of either the Roman Catholic or Orthodox Churches.

Whatever Bogomilism was, it satisfied the religious neces-

BOSNIA

30s

sities of the mass of Bosnians for nearly two hundred and fifty
years, notwithstanding the savage attacks of both the Roman
Catholic and the Orthodox Churches. The Roman Catholic
Church was the more dangerous of the two. This was not
because the Orthodox Church had the advantage in tolerance :
the Council of Constantinople laid it down that Bogomils must
be burned alive. It was because the political situation in the
East became more and more unfavourable to the Orthodox
Church, until finally the coming of the Turks ranged them among
the objects rather than the inflictors of persecution. The Latin
Church had no such mellowing misfortunes ; and though for a
time it lost its harshness towards heretics, and was, for example,
most merciful towards Jews and Arians under the Carlovingians,
it was finally urged by popular bigotry and adventurous monarchs
to take up the sword against the enemies of the faith.

At the end of the twelfth century we find a King of Dal-
matia who wanted to seize Bosnia complaining to the Pope
that the province was full of heretics, and appealing to him to
get the King of Hungary to expel them. This began a system
of interference which was for long wholly unavailing. In 1221
there were none but Bogomil priests in Bosnia, under whom the
Country was extremely devout. But the zeal of the Church had
been fired, and in 1247 the Pope endeavoured to inspire the
Archbishop of Bosnia by describing to him how his predecessors
had tried to redeem their see by devastating the greater part
of it and by killing or carrying away in captivity many thousands
of Bosnians. The people, however, remained obstinately Bogo-
mil, and as soon as the attention of the Papacy was diverted
elsewhere, as it was during the Waldensian persecutions and the
Great Schism, they stood firm in their faith again. Finally it
was adopted as the official State religion.

But the Papacy had staked a great deal on Bosnia. It had
preached crusade after crusade against the land, with full indul-
gences, as in the case of crusades to Palestine. It had sent out
brigades of missionaries, who had behaved with glorious hero-
ism and had in many cases suffered martyrdom. It had used
every form of political pressure on neighbouring monarchs to
induce them to invade Bosnia and put it to fire and the sword.
It had, by backing Catholic usurpers to the Bosnian throne,
caused perpetual disorder within the kingdom and destroyed all
possibility of dynastic unity. Now it made one last supreme

3o6 black lamb AND GREY FALCON

effort. It supported the Emperor Sigismund of Hungary, who
held Croatia and Dalmatia, and who wished to add Bosnia to his
kingdom. This was not a step at all likely to promote the cause
of order. Sigismund was a flighty adventurer whose indifference
to Slav interests was later shown by his surrender of Dalmatia to
Venice. But the Pope issued a Bull calling Christendom to a
crusade against the Turks, the apostate Arians and the heretic
Bosnians, and the Emperor embarked on a campaign which
was sheer vexation to the tortured Slav lands, and scored the
success of capturing the Bosnian king. The Bosnians were
unimpressed and replaced him by another, also a staunch
Bogomil. Later Sigismund sent back the first king, whose
claim to the throne was naturally resented by the second. The
wretched country was again precipitated into civil war.

This was in 1415. In 1389 the battle of Kossovo had been
lost by the Christian Serbs. For twenty-six years the Turks
had been digging themselves in over the border of Bosnia.
They had already some foothold in the southern part of the
kingdom. A child could have seen what was bound to happen.
The Turks offered the Bogomils military protection, secure pos-
session of their lands, and full liberty to practise their religion
provided they counted themselves as Moslems and not as
Christians, and did not attack the forces of the Ottoman Empire.
The Bogomils, having been named in a Papal Bull with the
Turks as conunon enemies of Christendom and having suffered
invasion in consequence, naturally accepted the offer. Had it
not been for the intolerance of the Papacy we would not have had
Turkey in Europe for five hundred years. Fifty years later, the
folly had been consummated. Bosnia was wholly Turkish, and
the Turks had passed on towards Hungary and Central Europe.
It is worth while noting that a band of Bogomils who had been
driven out of Bosnia by a temporary Catholic king, while their
companions had been sent in chains to Rome to be " benig-
nantly converted ”, valiantly defended the Herzegovinian moun-
tains against the Turks for another twenty years.

But the story does not stop there. It was only then that a
certain peculiar and awful characteristic of human nature
showed itself, as it has since shown itself on one other occasion
in history. There is a kind of human being, terrifying above
all others, who resists by yielding. Let it be supposed that it is
a woman. A man is pleased by her, he makes advances to her,

BOSNIA

307

he finds that no woman was ever more compliant. He marvels
at the way she allows him to take possession of her and perhaps
despises her for it. Then suddenly he finds that his whole life
has been conditioned to her, that he has become bodily de<
pendent on her, that he has acquired the habit of living in a
house with her, that food is not food unless he eats it with her.

It is at this point that he suddenly realises that he has not
conquered her mind, and that he is not sure if she loves him, or
even likes him, or even considers him of great moment. Then
it occurs to him as a possibility that she failed to resist him in
the first place because simply nothing he could do seemed of the
slightest importance. He may even suspect that she let him
come into her life because she hated him, and wanted him to
expose himself before her so that she could despise him for his
weakness. This, since man is a hating rather than a loving
animal, may not impossibly be the truth of the situation. There
will be an agonising period when he attempts to find out the
truth. But that he will not be able to do, for it is the essence
of this woman’s character not to uncover her face. He will
therefore have to withdraw from the frozen waste in which he
finds himself, where there is neither heat nor light nor food nor
shelter, but only the fear of an unknown enemy, and he will
have to endure the pain of living alone till he can love someone
else ; or he will have to translate himself into another person,
who will be accepted by her, a process that means falsification
of the soul. Whichever step he takes, the woman will grow
stronger and more serene, though not so strong and serene as
she will if he tries the third course of attempting to coerce her.

Twice the Slavs have played the part of this woman in the
history of Europe. Once, on the simpler occasion, when the
Russians let Napoleon into the core of their country, where he
found himself among snow and ashes, his destiny dead. The
second time it happened here in Sarajevo. The heretic Bosnian
nobles surrendered their country to the Turks in exchange for
freedom to keep their religion and their lands, but they were
aware that these people were their enemies. There could be no
two races more antipathetic than the Slavs, with their infinite
capacity for enquiry and speculation, and the Turks, who had no
word in their language to express the idea of being interested
in anything, and who were therefore content in abandonment to
the tropism of a militarist system. This antipathy grew stronger

3o8 black lamb and GREY FALCON

as the Turks began to apply to Bosnia the same severe methods
of raising revenue with which they drained all their conquered
territories, and the same S3rstem of recruiting. For some time
after the conquest they began to draw from Bosnia, as from
Serbia and Bulgaria and Macedonia, the pick of all the Slav
boys, to act as Janissaries, as the Pretorian Guard of the Otto-
man Empire. It was the fate of these boys to be brought up
ignorant of the names of their families or their birth-places,
to be denied later the right to marry or own property, to be
nothing but instruments of warfare for the Sultan’s use, as
inhuman as lances or bombs.

To these exactions the Bosnians submitted. They could do
nothing else. But the two Bosnian nobles who had been the
first to submit to the Turks came to this mining town and
founded a city which was called Bosna Sarai, from the fortress,
the Sarai, on the heights above it. Here they lived in a pride
undiminished by conquest, though adapted to it. It must be
remembered that these people would not see themselves as
renegades in any shocking sense. The followers of a heresy
itself strongly Oriental in tone would not feel that they were
abandoning Christianity in practising their worship under
Moslem protection, since Mohammed acknowledged the sanctity
of Christ, and Moslems had no objection to worshipping in
Christian churches. To this day in Sarajevo Moslems make a
special point of attending the Church of St. Anthony of Padua
every Tuesday evening. The Bosnian Moslems felt that they
had won their independence by a concession no greater than they
would have made had they submitted to the Roman Catholic
Church. So they sat down in their new town, firm in self-
respect, and profited by the expanding wealth of their con-
querors.

It was then, no doubt, that the town acquired its air of
pleasure, for among the Turks at that time voluptuousness
knew its splendid holiday. An insight into what its wealth
came to be is given us by a catastrophe. When Kara Mustapha,
the Vizier who tormented Dubrovnik, was beaten outside Vienna
his camp dazzled Europe with a vision of luxury such as it
had never seen, such as perhaps it has never known since.
His stores were immense ; he travelled with twenty thousand
head apiece of buffaloes, oxen, camels and mules, a flock of
ten thousand sheep, and a countiy’s crop of com and sugar and

BOSNIA

309

coffee and honey and fat. His camp was the girth of Warsaw,
wrote John Sobieski to his wife, and not imaginable by humble
Poles. The Vizier’s tent — this I know, for I once saw it in
Vienna — was a masterpiece of delicate embroidery in many
colours. There were also bathrooms flowing with scented
waters, gardens with fountains, superb beds, glittering lamps
and chandeliers and priceless carpets, and a menagerie contain-
ing all manner 'of birds and beasts and fishes. Before Kara
Mustapha fled he decapitated two of his possessions which he
thought so beautiful he could not bear the Christian dogs to
enjoy them. One was a specially beautiful wife, the other was
an ostrich. The scent of that world, luxurious and inclusive,
still hangs about the mosques and latticed windows and walled
gardens of Sarajevo..

But however sensuous that population might be it was never
supine. Sarajevo, as the seat of the new Moslem nobility, was
made the headquarters of the Bosnian Janissaries. These
Janissaries, however, singularly failed to carry out the intention
of their founders. Their education proved unable to make them
forget they were Slavs. They insisted on speaking Serbian, they
made no effort to conceal a racial patriotism, and what was more
they insisted on taking wives and acquiring property. Far from
inhumanly representing the Ottoman power in opposition to the
Bosnian nobles, they were their friends and allies. The Porte
found itself unable to alter this state of affairs, because the
Janissaries of Constantinople, who were also Slavs, had a lively
liking for them and could not be trusted to act against them.
It had no other resources, for it had exterminated the leaders of
the Bosnian Christians and in any case could hardly raise them
up to fight for their oppressors.

Hence there grew up, well within the frontiers of the Otto-
man Empire, a Free City, in which the Slavs lived as they liked,
according to a constitution they based on Slav law and custom,
and defied all interference. It even passed a law by which the
Pasha of Bosnia was forbidden to stay more than a night at a
time within the city walls. For that one night he was treated as
an honoured guest, but the next morning he found himself
escorted to the city gates. It was out of the question that the
Ottoman Empire should ever make Sarajevo its seat of govern-
ment. That had to be the smaller town of Travnik, fifty miles
away, and even there the Pasha was not his own master. If

VOL. I X

3t« BLACK LAMB AND GBEY FALCON

the Janissaries of Sarajevo complained of him to the Sublime
Porte, he was removed. Fantastically, the only right that the
Porte insisted on maintaining to prove its power was the appoint-
ment of two officials to see that justice was done in disputes
between Christians and Moslems ; and even then the Commune
of Sarajevo could dismiss them once they were appointed. Often
the sultans and viziers must have wondered, “ But when did
we conquer these people ? Alas, how can we have thought we
had conquered these people ? What would we do not to have
conquered these people ? ’’

Things went very well with this mutinous city for centuries.
Its independence enabled it to withstand the shock of the blows
inflicted on the Turks at Vienna and Belgrade, which meant
that they must abandon their intention of dominating Europe.
There came a bad day at the end of the seventeenth century,
when Prince Eugene of Savoy rode down from Hungary with
his cavalry and looked down on the city from a foothill at the
end of the valley. Then the Slavs proved their unity in space
and time, and the Bosnians rehearsed the trick that the Russians
were later to play on Napoleon. The town. Prince Eugene was
told, had been abandoned. It lay there, empty, to be taken.
Prince Eugene grew thoughtful and advanced no further,
though he had been eager to see this outpost of the East, whose
atmosphere must have been pleasing to his own type of voluptu-
ousness. He turned round and went back to the Danube at
the head of a vast column of Christian refugees whom he took
to Austrian territory. Perhaps that retreat made the difference
between the fates of Prince Eugene and Napoleon.

After that a century passed and left Sarajevo much as it
was, plump in insubordination. Then came the great reforming
sultans, Selim 111 and Mahmud II, who saw that they must
rebuild their house if it were not to tumble about their ears.
They resolved to reorganise the Janissaries, and, when that
proved impossible, to disband them. These were by now a com-
pletely lawless body exercising supreme authority over all law-
fijlly constituted administrative units. Also the sultans resolved
to reform the land and taxation system which made hungry slaves
of the peasants. Nothing would have been less pleasing to
Sarajevo. The Janissaries and the Bosnian nobility had worked
together to maintain unaltered the feudal system which had
perished in nearly all other parts of Europe, and the proposal

BOSNIA

3»i

to remove the disabilities of the Christian peasants reawakened
a historic feud. The Bosnian Moslem city-dwelling nobles
hated these Christian peasants, because they were the descend-
ants of the Catholic and Orthodox barons and their followers
who had opened the door to the invader by their intolerance
of Bogomilism.

Therefore the Janissaries and the Moslem nobles fought the
sultans. The Janissaries refused to be disbanded and when
their brothers had been exterminated in Constantinople the
prohibited uniform was still to be seen in Sarajevo : the blue
pelisse, the embroidered under-coat, the huge towering turban,
decorated when the wearer was of the higher ranks with bird-
of-paradise plumes, the high leather boots, red and yellow and
black according to rank. In time they had to retreat from the
town to the fortress on the heights above it, and that too fell
later to the troops of the central authority ; Bosnian nobles
were beheaded, and the Pasha entered into full possession of the
city where for four centuries he had been received on sufferance.
But after a few months, in July 1828, the Sarajevans took their
revenge and, aided by the citizens of a neighbouring town called
Visok, broke in and for three days massacred their conquerors.
Their victory was so terrible that they were left undisturbed till
1850, and then they were defeated by a Turkish empire which
itself was near to defeat, and was to be drummed out of Bosnia
by peasants not thirty years later. At last the two lovers had
destroyed each other. But they were famous lovers. This
beautiful city speaks always of their preoccupation with one
another, of what the Slav, not to be won by any gift, took from
the Turk, and still was never won, of the unappeasable hunger
with which the Turk longed throughout fhe centuries to make
the Slav subject to him, although the Slav is never subject, not ,
even to himself.

Sarajevo II

We knew we should try to get some sleep before the evening,
because Constantine was coming from Belgrade and would
want to sit up late and talk. But we hung about too late in the
bazaar, watching a queue of men who had lined up to have
their fezes ironed. It is an amusing process. In a steamy

3M BLACK LAMB AND GREY FALCON

shop two Moslems were working, each clapping a fez down on
a fez-shaped cone heated inside like an old-fashioned flat-iron
and then clapping down another cone on it and screwing that
down very tight, then releasing the fez with a motherly ex-
pression. “ What extremely tidy people the Moslems must be,”
said my husband ; but added, “ This cannot be normal, how-
ever. If it were there would be more shops of this sort. There
must be some festival to-morrow. We will ask the people at
the hotel.” But we were so tired that we forgot, and slept so
late that Constantine had to send us up a message saying he
had arrived and was eager to go out to dinner.

When we came downstairs Constantine was standing in the
hall, talking to two men, tall and dark and dignified, with the
sallow, long-lashed dignity of Sephardim. “ I tell you I have
friends everywhere," he said. " These are two of my friends,
they like me very much. They are Jews from Spain, and they
speak beautiful soft Spanish of the time of Ferdinand and
Isabella, not the Spanish of to-day, which is hard and guttural
as German. This is Dr. Lachan, who is a banker, and Dr.
Marigan, who is a judge. I think they are both very good
men, they move in a sort of ritual way along prescribed paths,
and there is nothing ever wrong. Now they will take us to a
cafi where we will eat a little, but it is not for the eating they
are taking us there, it is because they have heard there is a
girl there who sings the Bosnian songs very well, and it is not
for nothing that there are so many mosques in Sarajevo ; this
is truly the East, and people attach great importance to such
things as girls who sing the Bosnian songs, even though they
are very serious people.”

The men greeteS us with beautiful and formal manners,
and we went down the street to the cafe. It could be seen they
liked Constantine half because he is a great poet, half because
he is like a funny little dog. But at the door they began to think
of us and wonder if they should take us to such a place. " For
us and our wives it is nice," they said, “ but we are used to it.
Perhaps for an English lady it will seem rather strange. There
are sometimes dancers . . . well, there is one now.” A stout
woman clad in sequined pink muslin trousers and brassi^e
was standing on a platform revolving her stomach in time to
the music of a piano and violin, and as we entered she changed
her subject matter and began to revolve her large firm breasts

SCANIA

313

in opposite directions. This gave an effect of hard, mechanical
magic ; it was as if two cannon-balls were rolling away from
each other but were for ever kept contingent by some invisible
power of attraction. ‘‘ Your wife does not mind ? " asked the
judge and the banker. “ 1 think not," said my husband. As
we went down the aisle one of the cannon-balls ceased to revolve,
though the other went on rolling quicker than ever, while the
woman cried out my name in tones of familiarity and welcome.
The judge and the banker showed no signs of having witnessed
this greeting. As we sat down I felt embarrassed by their silence
and said, in explanation, “ How extraordinary I should come
across this woman again.” “ 1 beg your pardon 7 " said the
judge. " How extraordinary it is,” 1 repeated, “ that I should
come across this woman again. I met her last year in Mace-
donia.” “ Oh, it is you that she knows ! ” exclaimed the judge
and the banker, and I perceived that they had thought she was
a friend of my husband’s.

I was really very glad to see her again. When Constantine
and I had been in Skoplje the previous Easter he had taken me
to a night club in the Moslem quarter. That form of entertain-
ment which we think of as peculiarly modern Western and
profligate was actually far more at home in the ancient and
poverty-stricken Near East. In any sizable village in Mace-
donia I think one would find at least one cafd where a girl sang
and there was music. In Skoplje, which has under seventy
thousand inhabitants, there are many such, including a night
club almost on a Trocadero scale. In the little Moslem
cabaret we visited there was nobody more opulent than a small
shopkeeper, but the performers numbered a male gipsy who
sang and played the gusla, a very beautiful Serbian singer, a
still more beautiful gipsy girl who sang and danced, and this
danseuse du ventre, who was called Astra. When Astra came
round and rattled the plate at our table I found she was a Salonica
Jewess, member of another colony of refugees from Ferdinand
and Isabella who still speak Spanish, and I asked her to come
and see me the next day at my hotel and give me a lesson in the
danse du ventre.

She was with me earlier than I had expected, at ten o’clock,
wearing a curious coat-frock, of a pattern and inexpert make
which at once suggested she had hardly any occasion to be fully
dressed, and that she would have liked to be a housewife in a row

Ji4 BLACK LAMB AND GREY FALCON

of houses all exactly alike. The lesson in the danse du ventre was
not a success. I picked up the movement wonderfully, she said ;
I had it perfectly, but I could not produce the right effect.
" Voyez-vous, Madame,” she said, in the slow French she had
pick^ up in a single term at a mission school, “ vous n’avez
pas de quoi.” It is the only time in my life that I have been
reproached with undue slenderness ; but I suppose Astra herself
weighed a hundred and sixty pounds, though she carried no
loose flesh like a fat Western woman, but was solid and elastic.
After the lesson had failed we sat and talked. She came of
a family of musicians. She had a sister who had married an
Englishman employed in Salonica, and now lived in Ealing and
had two pretty little girls, like dolls they were so pretty, Milly
and Lily. It was terrible they were so far away. She herself was
a widow ; her husband had been a Greek lorry driver who was
killed in a road accident after three years of marriage. She had
one son, a boy of ten. It was her ambition that he should go
to a French school ; in her experience there was nothing like
French education "pour faire libre I' esprit". In the meantime
he was at a Yugoslavian school and doing well, because he was
naturally a good and diligent little boy, but she wanted some-
thing better for him.

It was very disagreeable, her occupation. She did not state
explicitly what it included, but we took it for granted. It was
not so bad in Greece or Bulgaria or in the North of Yugoslavia,
in all of which places she had often worked, but of late she had
got jobs only in South Serbia, in night clubs where the clients
were for the most part Turks. She clapped her hand to her
brow and shook her head and said, " Vous ne savez pas, madame,
k quel point les Turcs sont idiots.” Her complaint when I in-
vestigated it, was just what it sounds. She was distressed
because her Turkish visitors had no conversation. Her coat-
frock fell back across her knee and showed snow-white cambric
underclothing and flesh scrubbed clean as the cleanest cook’s
kitchen table, and not more sensuous. She was all decency and
good sense, and she was pronouncing sound judgment.

The judgment was appalling. The Turks in South Serbia
are not like the Slav Moslems of Sarajevo, they are truly Turks.
They are Turks who were settled there after the battle of
Kossovo, who have remained what the Ataturk would not permit
Turks to be any longer. They are what a people must become

BOSNIA

315

if it suspends all intellectual life and concentrates on the idea
of conquest. It knows victory, but there is a limit to possible
victories ; what has been gained cannot be maintained, for that
requires the use of the intellect, which has been removed. So
there is decay, the long humiliation of decay. At one time the
forces of Selim and Suleiman covered half a continent with the
precise and ferocious ballet of perfect warfare, the sensuality
of the sultans and the viziers searched for fresh refinements
and made of their discoveries the starting points for further
search, fountains played in courtyards and walled gardens
where there had been till then austere barbarism. At the end
an ageing cabaret dancer, the homely and decent vanishing
point of voluptuousness, sits on a bed and says with dreadful
justice : " Vous ne savez pas, madame, k quel point les Turcs
sont idiots.”

When Astra came to our table later she told me that she
hoped to be in Sarajevo for some weeks longer, and that she
was happier here than she had been in Skoplje. " Ici,” she
pronounced, " les gens sont beaucoup plus cultives.” As soon
as she had gone I found at my shoulder the Swabian chauffeur
from Dubrovnik, whom we had paid off that afternoon. “ Why
is that woman talking to you ? ” he said. He always immensely
disconcerted me by his interventions. I was always afraid that
if I said to him, " What business is this of yours ? " he would
answer, in the loathsome manner of a miracle play, " 1 am
Reason ” or “ I am Conscience ”, and that it would be true.
So I stammered, “ I know her." " You cannot know such a
person,” he said. “ Do you mean you have been in some cafe
where she has performed ? ” “ Yes, yes," I said, " it was in
Skoplje, and she is a very nice woman, she has a son of whom
she is fond.” “ How do you know she has a son ? ” asked the
chauffeur. “ She told me so,” I said. " You do not have to
believe everything that such a person tells you,” said the
chauffeur. ” But I am sure it is true,” I exclaimed hotly, " and
I am very sorry for her.” The chauffeur gave me a glance too
heavily veiled by respect to be respectful, and then looked at
my husband, but sighed, as if to remind himself that he would
find no help there. Suddenly he picked up my bag and said,
" I came to say that I had remembered I had forgotten to take
that grease-spot out with petrol as I had promised you, so I
will take it outside and do it now.” He then bowed, and left

3i6 black lamb AND GREY FALCON

me. I thought, " He is really too conscientious, this is very
inconvenient for now I have no powder." But of course he
would not have thought it necessary for me to have any
powder.

But my attention was immediately diverted. A very hand-
some young man had come up to our table in a state of extreme
anger ; he was even angrier than any of the angry young men
in Dalmatia. He evidently knew Constantine and the judge
and the banker, but he did not give them any formal greeting.
Though his hair was bronze and his eyes crackled with blueness,
and he might have been brother to the two Moslems we had
seen talking politics in the park that afternoon, he cried out,
" What about the accursed Turks ? ” The judge and the
banker made no reply, but Constantine said, “ Well, it was not
I who made them.” The young man insisted, “ But you serve
our precious Government, don’t you ? ” " Yes,” said Con-

stantine, " for the sake of my country, and perhaps a little for
the sake of my soul, I have given up the deep peace of being
in opposition.” “ Then perhaps you can explain why your
Belgrade gangster politicians have devised this method of in-
sulting us Bosnians,” said the young man. " We are used,"
he said, stretching his arms wide and shouting, " to their
iniquities. We have seen them insulting our brothers the
Croats, we have seen them spitting in the faces of all those
who love liberty. But usually there is some sense in what they
do, they either put money in their pockets or they consolidate
their tyranny. But this crazy burlesque can bring them no
profit. It can be done for no purpose but to wound the pride
of us Bosnians. Will you be polite enough to explain a little
why your horde of thugs and thieves have formed this curious
intention of paying this unprovoked insult to a people whose
part it should be to insult rather than be insulted ? ”

The judge leaned over to me and whispered, " It is all right,
Madame, they are just talking a little about politics.” “ But
what has the Government done to insult Bosnia ? ” I asked.
“ It has arranged,” said the banker, " that the Turkish Prime
Minister and Minister of War, who are in Belgrade discussing
our military alliance with them, are to come here to-morrow
to be received by the Moslem population.” “ Ah,” said my
husband, " that accounts for all the fezes being ironed. Well,
do many people take the visit like this young man ? ” “ No,”

BOSNU

3*7

said the banker, " he is a very extreme young man.” “ I would
not say so,” said the judge sadly.

At that moment the young man smashed his fist down on
the table and cried into Constantine's face, “ Judas Iscariot !
Judas Iscariot ! ” " No,” said poor Constantine to his retreating
back, ” I am not Judas Iscariot. I have indeed never been quite
sure which of the disciples I do resemble, but it is a very sweet
little one, the most mignon of them all.” He applied himself to
the business of eating a line of little pieces of strongly seasoned
meat that had been broiled on a skewer ; and when he set it
down wistfulness was wet in his round black eyes. ” All the
same 1 do not like it, what that young man said. It was not
agreeable. Dear God, I wish the young would be more
agreeable to my generation, for we suffered very much in the
war, and' if it were not for us they would still be slaves under
the Austrians.”

Cautiously the banker said, " Do you think it is really wise,
this visit ? ” Constantine answered wearily, " I think it is
wise, for our Prime Minister, Mr. Stoyadinovitch, does not do
foolish things.” “ But why is it objected to at all ? ” said my
husband. ” That even I understand a little,” said Constantine,
” for the Turks were our oppressors and we drove them out,
so that we Christians should be free. And now the heads of the
Turkish state are coming by the consent of our Christian state
to see the Moslems who upheld the oppressors. I see that it
must seem a little odd.” “ But how is it possible,” said my
husband, ” that there should be so much feeling against the
Turks when nobody who is not very old can possibly have had
any personal experience of their oppressions ? ”

The three men looked at my husband as if he were talking
great nonsense. “ Well,” said my husband, “ were not the
Turks booted out of here in 1878?” “Ah, no, no!” ex-
claimed the three men. " You do not understand,” said Con-
stantine ; “ the Turkish Empire went from here in 1878, but
the Slav Moslems remained, and when Austria took control it
was still their holiday. For they were the favourites of the
Austrians, far above the Christians, far above the Serbs or the
Croats.” " But why was that ? " asked my husband. “ It was
because of the principle, divide et impera," said the banker.
It was odd to hear the phrase from the lips of one of its victims.
“ Look, there were fifty or sixty thousand people in the town,”

3i8 black lamb AND GREY FALCON

said the banker ; “ there were us, the Jews, who are of two
kinds, the Sephardim, from Spain and Portugal, and the others,
the Ashkenazi, who are from Central Europe and the East, and
that is a division. Then there were the Christian Slavs, who
are Croats and Serbs, and that is a division. But lest we
should forget our differences, they raised up the Moslems, who
were a third of the population, to be their allies against the
Christians and the Jews."

Their faces darkening with the particular sullenness of
rebels, they spoke of their youth, shadowed by the double
tyranny of Austria and the Moslems. To men of their position,
for both came from wealthy and influential families, that
t3rranny had been considerably mitigated. It had fallen with
a far heavier hand on the peasants and the inhabitants of the
poorer towns, and there it meant a great deal of imprisonment
and flogging, and occasional executions. But to these people
there had been a constant nagging provocation and a sense of
insult. The Moslems were given the finest schools and colleges,
the best posts in the administration were reserved for them, they
were invited to all official functions and treated as honoured
guests, the railway trains were held up at their hours of prayer.
The Turkish land system, which grossly favoured the Moslems
at the expense of the Christians, was carefully preserved intact
by his Catholic Majesty the Emperor Franz Josef. And it was a
special source of bitterness that the Austrians had forced their
way into Bosnia after the Slavs had driven out the Turks, on
the pretext that they must establish a garrison force to protect
the Christians there in case the Turks came back. That they
should then- humiliate the Christians at the hand of those
Moslems who had stayed behind seemed to these men an in-
flaming piece of hypocrisy which could never be forgotten or
forgiven.

They evidently felt this deeply and sincerely, although they
themselves were Jewish. The .situation was evidently one of
great complexity. That was apparent when they likened the
Turks to dogs and swine, and spoke the words with more than
Western loathing, as the Turks would have done. “ When I
went to Berlin to study for my degree,” said the banker, " I
used to feel ashamed because the Germans took me as an equal,
and here in my house I was treated as an inferior to men with
fezes on their heads, to Orientals.” In that statement too many

BOSNIA

3t9

strands were twisted. Later my husband asked, " But are the
Moslems a sufficiently important and active group for it to
matter whether they are encouraged or not ? " The lawyer and
the banker answered together," Oh, certainly,” and Constan-
tine explained, “ Yes, they are very, very clever politicians,
much cleverer than we are, for Islam taught them something,
let us say it taught them not to run about letting off guns just
because one of them had a birthday. Our Government has
always to conciliate the Moslems. In the present Cabinet Mr.
Spaho is the Minister of Transport, and he is a Moslem from this
town." " A most excellent man,” agreed the judge and banker,
beaming. All that they had spoken of for so long in such a
steady flow of hatred was forgotten in a glow of local patriotism.

At last it was time to go. " No, your Mr. Stoyadinovitch
has not done well,” said the banker finally. “ It is not that we
do not like the Moslems. Since the war all things have changed,
and we are on excellent terms. But it is not nice when they are
picked out by the Government and allowed to receive a cere-
monial visit from the representative of the power that crushed
us and ground us down into the mud.” We rose, and Astra
in her sequins and pink muslin bounced from the platform like
a great sorbo-ball to say good-bye. I wanted to give her a
present, but remembered that the chauffeur had taken my bag
away to clean it, so I told her to come and see me at the hotel
next day. As we went out the Swabian chauffeur suddenly
reappeared, rising from a table which was concealed by the
bushes and creepers which were set about to give the cabaret
the appearance of an open-air beer-garden. He handed back
my bag with a triumphant smile, and I perceived that he had
hidden himself for this very reason, that I should not be able
to find him and get my money, if I felt a charitable impulse
towards my unsuitable friend.

" And please note,” he said, his eyes passing uneasily from
my husband to me and then back again, deeply distressed by
our lack of sense, " it would be a good thing to stay indoors
to-morrow morning, for the Turkish Prime Minister and War
Minister are coming to visit the Moslems and there might be a
disturbance. At any rate, it is not for you, there will be great
crowds.” He spoke with authority out of the mass of his ideal
world, which was almost as solid as if it were real because it had
been conceived by his solid mind : a world in which people

aae BLACK LAMB AND GREY FALCON

with money were also reasonable people, who did not give alms
to the unworthy and stayed indoors when it was not so safe
outdoors. And his blindish-looking eyes begged us to remem-
ber that we were English and therefore to refrain from acting
like these Slavs.

Sarigevo III

I woke only once from my sleep, and heard the muezzins
crying out to the darkness from the hundred minarets of the
city that there is but one God and Mohammed his prophet.
It is a cry that holds an ultimate sadness, like the hooting of
owls and the barking of foxes in night-time. The muezzins
are making that plain statement of their cosmogony, and the
owls and the foxes are obeying the simplest need for expression ;
yet their cries, which they intended to mean so little, prove
more conclusively than any argument that life is an occasion
which justifies the hugest expenditure of pity. I had nearly
fallen asleep again when my husband said out of his dreams,
“ Strange, strange.” “ What is strange ? ” I said. “ That
Jewish banker," he replied, “ he said so proudly that when he
was a student in Berlin he felt ashamed because he was treated
there as an equal when here he was treated as inferior to the
Moslems. I wonder what he feels about Germany now.”

In the morning we were not late, but Constantine was down
before us, breakfasting in the cafe. One of the reasons why
people of the Nordic type dislike Constantine is that he is able
to do things out of sheer vitality for which they require moral
stimulus. His good red blood can fetch him out of bed without
a moment of sombre resolution, his vigorous pulse keeps him
going without resort to perseverance. The writings of the early
Christian fathers show that few things irritated them like a
pagan who was in full possession of the virtues. But though
he was vigorous this morning he was not gay. " Look at all
the flags,” he said, “ it is a great day for Sarajevo. See how I
show you all.” But he spoke glumly.

I suspected that he was secretly of his friends’ mind about
the day’s doings ; and indeed it was not exhilarating to look
out of the caf6 windows and see a stream of passing people,
and none of the men without fezes, all of the women veiled.
I do not mind there being such men and women, but one sees

BOSNIA

3*1

them with a different eye when they are in a majority and could
put at a disadvantage all those not of their kind. “ I can under-
stand that such a ceremony as this can revive all sorts of appre-
hensions,” I said tactlessly. “ We had better go," said Con-
stantine, ignoring my remark. “ The party from Belgrade are
not coming to the railway station, they stop the railway train
at a special halt in the middle of the boulevards, near the
museum, and it is quite a way from here.”

For part of the way we took a cab, and then we had to get
out and walk. Because Constantine had his Government pass
and we were to be present at the reception at the station, we
were allowed to go down the middle of the streets, which were
entirely lined with veiled women and men wearing fezes. Only
a few Christians were to be seen here and there. “ There seem
to be a great many Moslems,” I said, after the first two or three
hundred yards. The crowd was close-packed and unified by
a common aspect. The faces of the men were flattened, almost
plastered by an expression of dogged adherence to some
standard ; they were all turned upwards to one hope. The
women were as expressive in their waiting, though their faces
were hidden. A light rain was falling on their silk and cotton
overalls, but they did not move, and only some of them put up
umbrellas, though most of them were carrying them. It was as
if they thought of themselves already as participants in a sacred
rite. Some of the spectators were arranged in processional
order and held small, amateurish, neatly inscribed banners,
some of them in Turkish script; and a great many of them
carried Yugoslavian flags, very tidily, not waving them but
letting them droop. There were many children, all standing
straight and good under the rain. I looked at my watch, and I
saw that we had been walking between these crowds for ten
minutes. There are thirty thousand Moslems in Sarajevo, and
I think most of them were there. And they were rapt, hal-
lucinated, intoxicated with an old loyalty, and doubtless ready
to know the intoxication of an old hatred.

We came to the halt at the right moment, as the train slid
in and stopped. There was a little cheering, and the flags were
waved, but it is not much fun cheering somebody inside the
tin box of a railway carriage. The crowd waited to make sure.
The Moslem mayor of Sarajevo and his party went forward
and greeted the tall and jolly Mr. Spaho, the Minister of

3aa BLACK LAMB AND GREY EALCON

Transport, and the Yugoslavian Minister of War, General
Merits, a giant who wore his strength packed round him in solid
masses like a bull. He looked as Goering would like to look.
There were faint, polite cheers for them ; but the great cheers
the crowd had had in its hearts for days were never g^ven.
For Mr. Spaho and the General were followed, so far as the
expectations of the crowd were concerned, by nobody. The
two little men in bowlers and trim suits, very dapper and well-
shaven, might have been Frenchmen darkened in the Colonial
service. It took some time for the crowd to realise that they
were in fact Ismet Ineunue, the Turkish Prime Minister, and
Kazim Ozalip, his War Minister.

Even after the recognition had been established the cheers
were not given. No great degree of disguise concealed the
disfavour with which these two men in bowler hats looked on
the thousands they saw before them, all wearing the fez and
veil which their leader the Ataturk made it a crime to wear in
Turkey. Their faces were blank yet not unexpressive. So
might Englishmen look if, in some corner of the Empire, they
had to meet as brothers the inhabitants of a colony that had
been miraculously preserved from the action of time and had
therefore kept to their woad.

The Moslem mayor read them an address of welcome, of
which, naturally, they did not understand one word. This was
bound in any case to be a difficult love-affair to conduct, for they
knew no Serbian and the Sarajevans knew no Turkish. They
had to wait until General Marits had translated it into French ;
while they were waiting I saw one of them fix his eye on a
distant building, wince, and look in the opposite direction.
Some past-loving soul had delved in the attics and found the
green flag with the crescent, the flag of the old Ottoman Empire,
which these men and their leader regarded as the badge of a.
plague that had been like to destroy their people. The General’s
translation over, they responded in French better than his, only
a little sweeter and more birdlike than the French of France, and
stood still, their eyes set on the nearest roof, high enough to save
them the sight of this monstrous retrogade profusion of fezes and
veils, of red pates and black muzzles, while the General put back
into Serbian their all too reasonable remarks. They had told
the Moslems of Sarajevo, it seemed, that they felt the utmost
enthusiasm for the Yugoslavian idea, and had pointed out

fiOSMU jij

that if the South Slavs did not form a unified state the will
of the great powers could sweep over the Balkan Peninsula as
it chose. They had said not one word of the ancient tie that
linked the Bosnian Moslems to the Turks, nor had they made
any reference to Islam.

There were civil obeisances, and the two men got into an
automobile and drove towards the town. The people did not
cheer them. Only those within sight of the railway platform
were aware that they were the Turkish Ministers, and even
among those were many who could not believe their eyes, who
thought that there must have been some breakdown of the
arrangements. A little procession of people holding banners
that had been ranged behind the crowd at this point wrangled
among itself as to whether it should start, delayed too long, and
finally tried to force its way into the roadway too late. By that
time the crowd had left the pavements and was walking under
the drizzle back to the city, slowly and silently, as those who
have been sent empty away.

We had seen the end of a story that had taken five hundred
years to tell. We had seen the final collapse of the old Ottoman
Empire. Under our eyes it had heeled over and fallen to the
ground like a lay figure slipping off a chair. But that tragedy
was already accomplished. The Ottoman Empire had ceased to
suffer long ago. There was a more poignant grief before us.
Suppose that such an unconquerable woman as may be com-
pared to the Slav in Bosnia was at last conquered by time, and
sent for help to her old lover, and that there answered the call
a man bearing her lover’s name who was, however, not her
lover but his son, and looked on her with cold eyes, seeing
her only as the occasion of a shameful passage in his family
history ; none of us would be able to withhold our pity.

Sarajevo IV

“ I am so glad that this is a bad spring," I said, " for other
wise I should never have seen snow on the roof of a mosque,
and there is something delicious about that incongruity.” “ But
it is killing all the plum blossom you like so much to see,” said
Constantine, " and that is a terrible thing, for in Bosnia and
Serbia we live a little by our timber and our mines, but mostly

334 BLACK LAMB AND GREY FALCON

by our pigs and our plums. But for you I am glad of the bad
weather, for if it had been better you would have wanted to be
out on the hills all the time, and as it is you have got to know
my friends. Will you not agree that life in this town is specially
agreeable ? ’’ “ Yes," said my husband, “ it is all that I hoped
for in Istanbul, but never found, partly because I was a stranger,
and partly because they are reformist and are trying for excellent
motives to uproot their own charm." “ I have liked it all," I
said, “ except that afternoon when the Turkish Ministers were
here and I went to see the mosque in the bazaar. Then I felt
as if I had insisted on being present while a total stranger had
a tooth out. But that was my fault.”

1 had thoughtlessly chosen to see the mosque that afternoon,
and had found the whole courtyard full of Moslems who were
waiting there because a rumour had spread that the Turkish
Ministers were going to visit it. On their faces lay that
plastered, flattened look of loyalty to a cause which I had
noticed in the crowd at the railway station that morning. But
it was mingled now with that stoical obstinacy a child shows
when it insists on repeating a disappointing experience, so that
it can have no doubt that it really happened. It seemed indecent
for a Christian to intrude on them at such a moment, and for a
woman too, since the whole Moslem theory of the relationship
of the sexes falls to pieces once any man has failed in a worldly
matter. I had even hesitated to admire the mellow tiles and
fretted arches of the fa9ade or to go into the interior, so like a
light and spacious gymnasium for the soul, to see the carpets
presented by the pious of three centuries; what have been the
recreations of the warrior must seem a shame to him when his
weapons have been taken away.

But this was the one time when staying in Sarajevo was not
purely agreeable. The visit was, indeed, like being gently em-
braced by a city, for all classes had borrowed from the Moslem
his technique for making life as delightful as might be. Our
Jewish friends were strict in their faith but their lives were as
relaxed, as obstinately oriented towards the agreeable as Moham-
med would have had his children in time of peace. We went up
to visit the banker in his large modern offices, which indeed
almost amounted to a sky-scraper, and his welcome was sweet
without reserve, and this was not due to mere facility, for he was
a very wise man, sometimes almost tongue-tied with the burden

BOSNIA

325

of his wisdom, as the old Jewish sages must have been. It was
only that till the contrary evidence was produced he preferred
to think us as good as any friends he had. He was no fool, he
would not reject that evidence if it came ; but it had not come.

There were brought in, as we sat, cups of a sweet herbal
infusion, as distinct from all other beverages as tea or coffee.
We exclaimed in delight, and he told us, " It is a Turkish drink
that we all give to our visitors in our offices in Sarajevo. It is
supposed to be an aphrodisiac.** He was amused, but without
a snigger, at the custom he followed. “Think of it,” he said.
" I told that to a German engineer who was here last month,
and he went out and bought two kilos of it. An extraordinary
people.” He went on to speak of his city, which he saw with
the eye of a true lover, as astonished by its beauty as any stranger.
That we should see it well he had arranged for two young women
relatives of his to take us round the sights, and he produced
them forthwith. They were entrancing. For theme they had
the free, positive, creative attractiveness of the Slav ; their style
had been perfected in the harem. They had husbands and
loved them, the banker was no more than kin and a friend, and
my husband himself would admit that they felt for him only as
the courtier speaks it in ylr You Like It,” Hereafter in another
and a better world than this I should desire more love and
knowledge of you But though they kept well within the
framework of fastidious manners, they reminded the banker and
my husband that it must have been very pleasant to keep a
covey of darlings in silks and brocades behind latticed windows,
who would laugh and scuttle away, though only to an inner
chamber where they could be found again after a second’s
search, and sing and touch the strings of the gusla and mock
the male and be overawed by him, and mock again, in an un-
ending, uncriticised process of delight.

I record a wonder. The work of the bank was well done.
That, with my cold inner eye that trusts nothing, least of all
my own likings, I checked later. The banker was a man of
exceptional ability and integrity and he worked hard according
to the severest Western standards. But he appeared to keep
his appointments with life as well as, and even during, his
business engagements. Several times we went out with the
two young women, and we always went back to the office and
found the hot herbal tea, and coffee served with little squares

VOL. 1 Y

3z6 black lamb AND GREY FALCON

of Turkish delight on toothpicks, and' much laughter, and a
sense of luxurious toys. Once we went in and found half a
dozen pictures of Sarajevo, bought by the banker out of his
infatuation with the city, stacked on the big sofa and against
the walls, and it was as if the caravans had come in from the
North with a freight of Frankish art. The two women ran
about from one to another of these novelties, they took sides,
they became partisans of this picture and intrigued against
that. There was an inherent fickleness in their admiration.
They would tire of the familiar, but no doubt it is more im-
portant for the artist to have the new encouraged.

“ 'What do you think of them ? ” the banker asked me. I
wished he had not. They were the work of a Jewish refugee
from Berlin, and though his perception was delicate and his
brush subtle, each canvas showed him the child of that spirit
which had destroyed him. There was the passion for the thick
black line, the Puritan belief that if one pays out strength when
making an artistic effort one will create a strong work of art.
He had put a cast-iron outline to the tree on his canvas, and
because it took vigour to make such an outline, and because
cast-iron is an unyielding substance, he believed that the result
was virile painting, even though his perception of the tree’s
form had been infantile in its feebleness. It is the same heresy
that expresses itself in the decree that had driven him into exile.
Because it is a vigorous act to throw the Jews out of Germany
and because it causes pain and disorder, it is taken as a measure
of virile statescraft, although its relevance to the troubles of the
country could be imagined only by an imbecile.

Something of this I said, and the banker motioned my
husband and myself to step with him to the window, leaving
the two women to bicker like birds over the pictures. With the
grave smile, which could not possibly become laughter, of a
sage confessing his own folly, he said, " I have remembered
again and again a foolish thing I said when we first met. I
told you that when I went to Berlin as a student I rejoiced as
a Jew at being treated as an equal, while I was treated as an
inferior here. That must have amused you. It was a piece of
naivet*£ like a man boasting of his friendship with one who has
'spared no pains to show him that he considers him a fool, a
bore, an oaf." He looked out for a moment on the mosques, on
the domes of the old caravanserai among the tiled roofs of the

BOSNIA

3*7

bazaar, on the poplars standing over the city like the golden
ghosts of giant Janissaries. “ But it is puzzling, you know, not
to be able to look to Germany as one’s second home, when it
has been that to one all one’s life long. But one can come home
to one’s hearth, and I am fortunate that Sarajevo is mine.”

He went back and stood before the pictures, the young
women each taking an arm, one fluting that he must hang the
picture of the little Orthodox church over his desk, the other
screaming that he must throw it away, he must bum it, he must
give it to one-eyed Marko the scavenger. I thought he was
promising himself too little. In this office there lingered some-
thing of the best of Turkish life ; and in his integrity, in his
dismissal of the little, in the seriousness which he brought to the
interpretation of his experience, there was preserved the best
of what a German philosophical training could do for a man
of affairs. It seemed to me exquisitely appropriate that the
vulgar should call the Jews old-clothes men. Since it is the
peculiar madness of us other races to make ourselves magnifi-
cent clothes and then run wild and throw them away and daub
ourselves with mud, it is well that there should be some old-
clothes men about.

These Jews of Sarajevo are indeed an amazing community)
I could bring forward as evidence the Bulbul and her mate,
the two human beings who more than any others that I have
ever met have the right arrangement and comforting signifi-
cance of a work of art. They were not only husband and wife,
they were kin ; and this common blood had its own richness and
its own discipline, for they came of a family that was con-
sidered among Orthodox Jews as Orthodox Jews are con-
sidered by Liberal Jews, as the practitioners of an impossibly
exacting rule. “ His father,” said Constantine of the Bulbul’s
mate, who was named Selim, " was the most hieratic Jew that
can ever be. All to him from the rising to the setting of the sun
was a ritual, and he was very dominant, he made it so for all the
world. I have seen it happen that when Selim was swimming
in the sea at Dubrovnik, and he saw his father standing on the
beach, and immediately he began to swim in a very hieratic
manner, putting his hands out so and so, very slowly, and
lifting his head out of the water and looking very gravely down
his nose.”

This was credible, for Selim’s dignity was magnificent but

328 BLACK LAMB AND GREY FALCON

not pompous, as if it were an inherited garment and its previous
weairers had taken the stiffness out of it, He was a very tall
man with broad shoulders, broad even for a man of his height.
His build suggested the stylised immensity of a god sculpted
by a primitive people, and his face also had the quality of
sculpture ; though his wit and imagination made it mobile, it
was at once the tables of the law and the force that shattered
them. He had an impressive habit, as we discovered the first
night we went out to dinner with him and his wife, of stopping
suddenly as he walked along the street when he had thought
of something important and of staying quite still as he said it.
The spot where he halted became Mount Sinai, and in his
leisurely and massive authority could be seen the Moses whom
Michelangelo had divined but could not, being a Gentile and
therefore of divided and contending will, fully create in the
strength of his lawfulness.

But the fascination of himself and his wife lay initially in
their voices. There is a special music lingering about the tongues
of many of these Spanish Jews, but no one else gave it such
special performance. Selim had constrained his gift a little out
of deference to the Western tenet that a man should not be more
beautiful than can be helped and that a certain decent drabness
should be the character of all he does, but from his wife’s lips
that music came in such animal purity that we called her the
Bulbul, which is the Persian word for nightingale. Voices like
these were the product of an existence built by putting pleasure
to pleasure, as houses are built by putting brick to brick.. A
human being could not speak so unless he or she loved many
other sounds — the wind’s progress among trees or the subtler
passage it makes through grasses ; note lay note given out by
a musical instrument, each note for its own colour ; the gurgle
of wine pouring from a bottle or water trickling through a
marble conduit in a garden — all sorts of sounds that many
Westerners do not even hear, so corrupted are they by the
tyranny of the intellect, which makes them inattentive to any
message to the ear which is without an argument. Listening
to her, one might believe humanity to be in its first unspoiled
morning hour. Yet she was accomplished, she used her music
with skill, and she was wise, her music was played for a good
end. She built for grave and innocent purposes on a technique
of ingenuity which had been developed in the harem.

BOSNIA

329

The Bulbul was not as Western women. In her beauty sh$
resembled the Persian ladies of the miniatures, whose lustre I
had till then thought an artistic convention but could now
recognise in her great shining eyes, her wet red lips, her black
hair with its white reflections, her dazzling skin. This bright-
ness was like a hard transparent veil varnished on her, wholly
protective. Even if someone had touched her, it would not
have been she who was touched. Within this protection, she
was liquid with generosity. She was continually anxious to
give pleasure to her friends, even were they so new and untried
as ourselves. If we were in a caf6 and a man passed with a
tray of Turkish sweetmeats, her face became tragical till she
was sure that she could call him back and give us the chance of
tasting them. If we were driving down a street and she saw
the first lilies of the valley in a flower shop, she would call on
the driver to stop that she might buy us some, with an im-
perativeness found more usually in selfishness than in altruism.
When she had brought us to the cafe where a famous gipsy
musician was singing, she relaxed like a mother who has
succeeded in obtaining for her children something she knows
they should have. The seasons irked her by the limitations
they placed on her generosity : since it was not mid-winter she
could not take us up to the villages above Sarajevo for ski-ing,
and since it was not midsummer she could not open her country
house for us. Had one been cruel enough to point out to her
that one would have been happier with a million pounds, and
that she was not in a position to supply it, she would for a
moment or two really have suffered, and even when she realised
that she had been teased her good sense would not have been
able to prevent her from feeling a slight distress.

Yet there was nothing lax about this woman. Though she
lived for pleasure and the dissemination of it, she shone with a
chastity as absolute as that radiated by any woman who detested
pleasure. She had accepted a mystery. She had realised that
to make a Held where generosity can fulfil its nature absolutely,
without reserve, one must exclude all but one other person, com-
mitted to loyalty. That field was marriage. Therefore when she
spoke to any man other than her husband she was all to him,
mother, sister, friend, nurse and benefactress, but not a possible
mate. She was thus as virginal as any dedicated nun, and that
for the sake not of renunciation but of consummation. But

33« BLACK LAMB AND GREY FALCON

her nature was so various that she comprised many opposites.
Sometimes she seemed the most idiosyncratic of natures ;
standing on a balcony high over a street, we looked down on
the pavement and saw her walking far below, with a dozen
before her and behind her, darkly dressed like herself, and we
were able to say at once, " Look, there is the little Bulbul."
But there were other times when everything she did was so
classical, so tried and tested in its validity, that she seemed to
have no individuality at all, and to be merely a chalice filled
with a draught of tradition.

There was, indeed, a great range of human beings to be
seen in Sarajevo, all of sorts imknown to us. In Dubrovnik
we had visited an antique shop kept by a young man called
Hassanovitch, of admirable taste, and my husband had bought
me the most beautiful garment I have ever possessed, a cere-
monial robe of Persian brocade about a hundred and fifty years
old, with little gold trees growing on a background faintly
purple as a wine-stain. We bought it in a leisurely way, over
several evenings, supported by cups of coffee and slices of Banya
Luka cheese, which is rather like Port Salut, brought in by his
little brothers, of which there seemed an inordinate number,
all with the acolyte’s air of huge quantities of original sin in
suspension. He had given us a letter of introduction to his
father, the leading antique dealer of Sarajevo, who invited us
to his house, a villa up among the high tilted suburbs.

There we sat and enjoyed the crystalline neatness and
cleanliness of the prosperous Moslem home, with its divans
that run along the wall and take the place of much cumbrous
furniture, and its wall decorations of rugs and textiles, which
here were gorgeous. We told the father about his son and how
much we had admired his shop, and we mentioned too a feature
of our visits that had much amused us. Always we had found
sitting by the counter a beautiful girl, not the same for more
than a few evenings, an English or American or German
tourist, who would look at us with the thirsty and wistful eye
of a gazelle who intends to come down to the pool and drink
as soon as the hippopotami have ceased to muddy the water.
The elder Mr. Hassanovitch stroked his beard and said in
gratified accents, “ And the kitten also catches mice,” and took
me to the women’s quarters so that I could tell his wife, the
mother of his fourteen children. She was an extremely beautiful

BOSNIA

331

woman in her middle forti^, peace shining from her eyes and
kneaded into the texture of her smooth flesh ; and she was
for me as pathetic as the women of Korchula, who believed
that they had earned their happiness because they had passed
certain tests of womanhood, and did not realise how fortunate
they were in having those tests applied. Like those others, she
was unaware that these tests would be irrelevant unless the
community felt a need for the functions performed by women,
and that infatuation with war or modern industry can make it
entirely forgetful of that need.

But our last impression of Mr. Hassanovitch was not to
be merely of benign domesticity. From the moment of our
meeting I had been troubled by a sense of familiarity about his
features, and suddenly my husband realised that we had seen
his face many times before. When the Archduke Franz
Ferdinand and his wife came to the town hall of Sarajevo on the
morning of June the twenty-eighth, 1914, Mr. Hassanovitch
was among the guests summoned to meet them for he was
already an active Moslem politician, and he is standing to the
right of the doorway in a photograph which has often been
reproduced, showing the doomed pair going out to their death.
That day must have been a blow to him. The contention of our
Jewish friends that the Austrians had pampered the Moslems
at the expense of the Christians, and had made them zealous
supporters, is borne out by the constitution of the assembly
shown by that photograph : and other photographs taken that
morning show that when Princip was arrested the men in the
crowd who are throwing themselves on him are all wearing the
fez.

But I think he would have preferred it to the day he had just
endured. The friends accompanying us, who knew him well,
spoke to him of the visit of the Turkish Ministers, and he
answered them with words that were blankly formal, a splendid
bandage of his pain and their possible embarrassment at having
provoked it. It was surprising that the visit had evidently been
as keen a disappointment to such an expert and informed
person as it was to the people in the street. Yet I suppose an
Irish-American politician would suffer deep pain if time should
bring to power in Eire a president who wanted to break with
the past and sent an emissary to the States to beg that the old
Catholic nationalism should be forgotten ; and that he would

BLACK LAMB AND GREY FALCON

33»

even shut his eyes to the possibility that it might happen. The
analogy was close enough, for here just as in an Irish ward in
an American town, one was aware that the actions and reactions
of history had produced a formidable amount of politics. One
could feel them operating below the surface like a still in a
basement.

But history takes different people differently, even the same
history. The Sarajevo market is held on Wednesdays, at the
centre of the town near the bazaar, in a straggling open space
surrounded by little shops, most of them Moslem pastrycooks’,
specialising in great cartwheel tarts stuffed with spinach or
minced meat. The country folk come in by driblets, beginning
as soon as it is fully light, and going on till nine or ten or eleven,
for some must walk several hours from their homes : more and
more pigeons take refuge on the roofs of the two little kiosques
in the market-place. There are sections in the market allotted
to various kinds of goods : here there is grain, there wool, more
people than one would expect are selling scales, and there are
stalls that gratify a medieval appetite for dried fish and meat,
which are sold in stinking and sinewy lengths. At one end of
the market are stuffs and embroideries which are chiefly horrible
machine-made copies of the local needle-work. The Moslem
women are always thickest here, but elsewhere you see as many
Christians as Moslems, and perhaps more ; and these Christians
are nearly all of a heroic kind.

The finest are the men, who wear crimson wool scarfs tied
round their heads and round their throats. This means that
they have come from villages high in the mountains, where the
wind blows down from the snows ; and sometimes the scarf
serves a double purpose, for in many such villages a kind of
goitre is endemic. These men count themselves as descendants
of the Haiduks, the Christians who after the Ottoman conquest
took refuge in the highlands, and came down to the valleys
every year on St. George’s Day, because by then the trees were
green enough to give them cover, and they could harry the
Turks by brigandage. They reckon that man can achieve the
highest by following the path laid down in the Old Testament.
I cannot imagine why Victorian travellers in these regions used
to express contempt for the rayas, or Christian peasants, whom
they encountered. Any one of these Bosnians could have made
a single mouthful of a Victorian traveller, green umbrella and

BOSNIA

333

all. They are extremely tall and sinewy, and walk with a
rhythmic stride which is not without knowledge of its own
grace and power. Their darkness flashes and their cheek-bones
are high and their moustaches are long over fierce lips. Thq^
wear dark homespun jackets, often heavily braided, coloured
belts, often crimson like their headgear, the Bosnian breeches
that bag between the thighs and outline the hip and flank, and
shoes made of leather thongs with upcurving points at the toe.
They seem to clang with belligerence as if they wore armour.
In every way, I hear, they are formidable. Their women have
to wait on them while they eat, must take sound beatings every
now and again, work till they drop, even while child-bearing,
and walk while their master rides.

Yet, I wonder. Dear God, is nothing ever what it seems ?
The women of whom this tale is told, and according to all
reliable testimony truly told, do not look in the least oppressed.
They are handsome and sinewy like their men ; but not such
handsome women as the men are handsome men. A sheep-
breeder of great experience once told me that in no species and
variety that he knew were the male and female of equal value
in their maleness and femaleness. Where the males were truly
male, the females were not so remarkably female, and where
the females were truly females the males were not virile. Con-
stantly his theory is confirmed here. The women look heroes
rather than heroines, they are raw-boned and their beauty is
blocked out too roughly. But I will eat my hat if these women
were not free in the spirit. They passed the chief tests I knew.
First, they looked happy when they had lost their youth.
Here, as in all Balkan markets, there were far more elderly
women than girls ; and there is one corner of it which is
reserved for a line of women all past middle life, who stand on
the kerb hawking Bosnian breeches that they have made from
their own homespun, and exchange the gossip of their various
villages. Among them I did not see any woman whose face
was marked by hunger or regret. All looked as if they had
known a great deal of pain and hardship, but their experience
had led none of them to doubt whether it is worth while to live.

It was quite evident as we watched them that these women
had been able to gratify their essential desires. I do not mean
simply that they looked as if they had been well mated. Many
Latin women who have been married at sixteen and have had

334

BLACK LAMB AND GREY FALCON

numbers of children look swollen and tallowy with frustration.
Like all other material experiences, sex has no value other than
what the spirit assesses ; and the spirit is obstinately influenced
in its calculation by its preference for freedom. In some sense
these women had never been enslaved. They had that mark of
freedom, they had wit. This was not mere guffawing and jeering.
These were not bumpkins, they could be seen now and then
engaging in the prettiest passages of formality. We watched
one of the few young women at the market seek out two of her
elders : she raised her smooth face to their old lips and they
kissed her on the cheek, she bent down and kissed their hands.
It could not have been more graciously done at Versailles ;
and their wit was of the same pointed, noble kind.

We followed at the skirts of one who was evidently the
Voltaire of this world. She was almost a giantess ; her greyish
red hair straggled about her ears in that untidiness which is
dearer than any order, since it shows an infatuated interest in
the universe which cannot spare one second for the mere
mechanics of existence, and it was tied up in a clean white clout
under a shawl passed under her chin and knotted on the top
of her head. She wore a green velvet jacket over a dark home-
spun dress and coarse white linen sleeves, all clean but wild,
and strode like a man up and down the market, halting every
now and then, when some sight struck her as irresistibly comic.
We could see the impact of the jest on her face, breaking its
stolidity, as a cast stone shatters the surface of water. The
wide mouth gaped in laughter, showing a single tooth. Then
a ferment worked in her eyes. She would turn and go to the
lower end of the market, and she would put her version of what
had amused her to every knot of women she met as she passed
to the upper end. I cursed myself because I could not under-
stand one word of what she said. But this much I could hear :
each time she made her joke it sounded more pointed, more
compact, and drew more laughter. When she came to the upper
end of the market and her audience was exhausted, a blankness
fell on her and she ranged the stalls restlessly till she found
another occasion for her wit.

This was not just a white blackbird. She was distinguished
not because she was witty but by the degree of her wit. Later
on we found a doorway in a street near by where the women
who had sold all their goods lounged and waited for a motor

BOSNIA

335

bus. We lounged beside them, looking into the distance as if
the expectation of a friend made us deaf : and our ears recorded
the authentic pattern, still recognisable although the words
could not be understood, of witty talk. These people could pass
what the French consider the test of a civilised society : they
could practise the art of general conversation. Voice dovetailed
into voice without impertinent interruption ; there was light
and shade, sober judgment was corrected by mocking criticism,
and another sober judgment established, and every now and
then the cards were swept off the table by a gush of laughter,
and the game started afresh.

None of these women could read. When a boy passed by
carrying an advertisement of Batya’s shoes they had to ask
a man they knew to read it for them. They did not suffer
any great deprivation thereby. Any writer worth his salt
knows that only a small proportion of literature does more than
partly compensate people for the damage they have suffered
by learning to read. These women were their own artists, and
had done well with their material. The folk-songs of the country
speak, I believe, of a general perception that is subtle and
poetic, and one had only to watch any group carefully for it to
declare itself. I kept my eyes for some time on two elderly
women who had been intercepted on their way to this club in
the doorway by a tall old man, who in his day must have been
magnificent even in this land of magnificent men. Waving a
staff as if it were a sceptre, he was telling them a dramatic
story, and because he was absorbed in his own story, the women
were not troubling to disguise their expressions. There was
something a shade too self-gratulatory in his handsomeness ;
no doubt he had been the coq du village in his day. In their
smiles that knowledge glinted, but not too harshly. They had
known him all their lives ; they knew that thirty years ago he
had not been so brave as he said he would be in the affair with
the gendarmes at the ford, but they knew that later he had
been much braver than he need have been when he faced the
Turks in the ruined fortress, they remembered him when the
good seasons had made him rich and when the snows and winds
had made him poor. They had heard the gossip at the village
well pronounce him right on this and wrong over that. They
judged him with mercy and justice, which is the sign of a free
spirit, and when his story was finished broke into the right

336 BLACK IAMB AND GREY FALCON

laughter, and flattered him by smiling at him as if they were all
three young again.

I suspect that women such as these are not truly slaves, but
have found a fraudulent method of persuading men to give
them support and leave them their spiritual freedom. It is
certain that men suffer from a certain timidity, a liability to
discouragement which makes them reluctant to go on doing
anything once it has been proved that women can do it as well.
This was most painfully illustrated during the slump in both
Europe and America, where wives found to their amazement
that if they found jobs when their husbands lost theirs and took
on the burden of keeping the family, they were in no luck at all.
For their husbands became either their frenzied enemies or
relapsed into an infantile state of dependence and never worked
again. If women pretend that they are inferior to men and
cannot do their work, and abase themselves by picturesque
symbolic rites, such as giving men their food first and waiting
on them while they eat, men will go on working and developing
their powers to the utmost, and will not bother to interfere
with what women are saying and thinking with their admittedly
inferior powers.

It is an enormous risk to take. It makes marriage a gamble,
since these symbols of abasement always include an abnegation
of economic and civil rights, and while a genial husband takes
no advantage of them — and that is to say the vast majority
of husbands — a malign man will exploit them with the
rapacity of the grave. It would also be a futile bargain to
make in the modern industrialised world, for it can only hold
good where there are no other factors except the equality of
women threatening the self-confidence of men. In our own
Western civilisation man is devitalised by the insecurity of
employment and its artificial nature, so he cannot be restored
to primitive power by the withdrawal of female rivalry and the
W'oman would not get any reward for her sacrifice. There is in
effect no second party to the contract. In the West, moreover,
the gambling risks of marriage admit of a greater ruin. A man
who is tied to one village and cannot leave his wife without
leaving his land is not so dangerous a husband as a man who
can step on a train and find employment in another town. But
the greatest objection to this artificial abjection is that it is a
conscious fraud on the part of women, and life will never be

BOSNIA

337

easy until human beings can be honest with one another. Still in
this world of compromises, honour is due to one so far successful
that it produces these grimly happy heroes, these women who
stride and laugh, obeying the instructions of their own nature
and not masculine prescription.

Sarajevo V

One morning we walked down to the river, a brightening
day shining down from the skies and up from puddles. A
Moslem boy sold us an armful of wet lilac, a pigeon flew up
from a bath in a puddle, its wings dispersing watery diamonds.
“ Now it is the spring,” said Constantine, “ I think we shall
have good weather to-morrow for our trip to Ilidzhe, and better
weather the day after for our trip to Yaitse. Yes, I think it will
be well. All will be very well.” When he is pleased with his
country he walks procession ally, like an expectant mother, with
his stomach well forw’ard. “ But see what we told you the other
night,” he said as we came to the embankment and saw the
Town Hall. ” Under the Austrians all was for the Moslems.
Look at this building, it is as Moslem as a mosque, yet always
since the Turks were driven out of Bosnia the Christians have
been two-thirds of the population. So did the Catholic Haps-
burgs deny their faith ”

Actually it is the Moslems who have most reason to com-
plain of this Town Hall, for their architecture in Sarajevo is
exquisite in its restraint and amiability, and even in modern
times has been true to that tradition. But this was designed
by an Austrian architect, and it is stuffed with beer and sausages
down to its toes. It is harshly particoloured and has a lumpish
two-storeyed loggia with crudely fretted arches, and it has little
round windows all over it which suggest that it is rich beyond
the dreams of avarice in lavatories, and its highly ornamented
cornices are Oriental in a pejorative sense. The minaret of the
idosque beside it has the air of a cat that watches a dog making
a fool of itself.

Within, however, it is very agreeable, and remarkably full
of light ; and in an office high up we found a tourist bureau,
conducted with passion by a man in the beginnings of middle
life, a great lover of his city. He dealt us out photographs of

338 BLACK LAMB AND GREY FALCON

it for some time, pausing to gloat over them, but stopped when
Constantine said, “ Show these English the room where they
held the reception which was the last thing the Archduke Franz
Ferdinand and the Archduchess Sophie saw of their fellow*
men.” The head of the tourist bureau bowed as if he had re-
ceived a compliment and led us out into the central lobby, where
a young man in a fez, a woman in black bloomers, and an old
man and woman undistinguishable from any needy and respect-
able pair in South Kensington, shuffled up the great staircase,
while a young man quite like an Englishman save that he was
carrying a gusla ran down it. We went into the Council
Chamber, not unsuccessful in its effort at Moslem pomp. ” All
is Moslem here,” said the head of the tourist bureau, “ and
even now that we are Yugoslavian the mayor is always a
Moslem, and that is right. Perhaps it helps us by conciliating
the Moslems, but even if it did not we ought to do it. For no
matter how many Christians we may be here, and no matter
what we make of the city — and we are doing wonderful things
with it — the genius that formed it in the first place was Moslem,
and again Moslem, and again Moslem.”

But the three reception rooms were as libellous as the
exterior. They were pedantically yet monstrously decorated
in imitation of certain famous buildings of Constantinople,
raising domes like gilded honeycomb tripe, pressing down
between the vaults polychrome stumps like vast inverted Roman
candles. That this was the copy of something gorgeous could
be seen ; it could also be seen that the copyist had been by
blood incapable of comprehending that gorgeousness. Punch-
drunk from this architecttiral assault I lowered my eyes, and
the world seemed to reel. And here, it appeared, the world
had once actually reeled.

“ It was just over here that I stood with my father,” said
the head of the tourist bureau. “ My father had been down-
stairs in the hall among those who received the Archduke and
Archduchess, and had seen the Archduke come in, red and
choking with rage. Just a little way along the embankment a
young man Chabrinovitch had thrown a bomb at him and had
wounded his aide-de-camp. So when the poor Mayor began
to read his address of welcome he shouted out in a thin alto,
‘ That’s all a lot of rot. I come here to pay you a visit, and you
throw bombs at me. It's an outrage.’ Then the Archduchess

BOSNIA

339

spoke to him softly, and he calmed down and said, ^ Oh, well,
you can -go on But at the end of the speech there was another
scene, because the Archduke had not got his speech, and for a
moment the secretary who had it could not be found. Then
when it was brought to him he was like a madman, because the
manuscript was all spattered with the aide-de-camp’s blood.

" But he read the speech, and then came up here with the
Archduchess, into this room. My father followed, in such a
state of astonishment that he walked over and took my hand
and stood beside me, squeezing it very tightly. We all could
not take our eyes off the Archduke, but not as you look at the
main person in a court spectacle. We could not think of him
as a royalty at all, he was so incredibly strange. He was striding
quite grotesquely, he was lifting his legs as high as if he were
doing the goose-step. I suppose he was trying to show that he
was not afraid.

" I tell you, it was not at all like a reception. He was talking
with the Military Governor, General Potiorek, jeering at him
and taunting him with his failure to preserve order. And we
were all silent, not because we were impressed by him, for he was
not at all our Bosnian idea of a hero. But we all felt awkward
because we knew that when he went out he would certainly be
killed. No, it was not a matter of being told. But we knew
how the people felt about him and the Austrians, and we knew
that if one man had thrown a bomb and failed, another man
would throw another bomb and another after that if he should
fail. I tell you it gave a very strange feeling to the assembly.
Then I remember he went out on the balcony — so — and looked
out over Sarajevo. Yes, he stood just where you are standing,
and he too put his arm on the balustrade.”

Before the balcony the town rises on the other side of the
river, in a gentle slope. Stout urban buildings stand among
tall poplars, and above them white villas stand among orchards,
and higher still the white cylindrical tombs of the Moslems
stick askew in the rough grass like darts impaled on the board.
Then fir-woods and bare bluffs meet the skyline. Under Franz
Ferdinand’s eye the scene must have looked its most enchanting
blend of town and country, for though it was June there had
been heavy restoring rains. But it is not right to assume that
the sight gave him pleasure. He was essentially a Hapsburg,
that is to say, his blood made him turn always from the natural

34« BLACK LAMB AND GREY FALCON

to the artificial, even when this was more terrifying than any*
thing primitive could be ; and this landscape showed him on
its heights nature unsubdued and on its slopes nature ac-
cepted and extolled. Perhaps Franz Ferdinand felt a patriotic
glow at the sight of the immense brewery in the foreground,
which was built by the Austrians to supply the needs of their
garrison and functionaries. These breweries, which are to be
found here and there in Bosnia, throw a light on the aggressive
nature of Austrian foreign policy and its sordid consequences.
They were founded while this was still Turkish, by speculators
whose friends in the government were aware of Austria's plans
for occupation and annexation. They also have their signifi-
cance in their affront to local resources. It is quite unnecessary
to drink beer here, as there is an abundance of cheap and good
wine. But what was Austrian was good and what was Slav
was bad.

It is unjust to say that Franz Ferdinand had no contact
with nature. The room behind him was full of people who
were watching him with the impersonal awe evoked by anybody
who is about to die ; but it may be imagined also as crammed,
how closely can be judged only by those who have decided how
many angels can dance on the point of a needle, by the ghosts
of the innumerable birds and beasts who had fallen to his gun.
He was a superb shot, and that is certainly a fine thing for a
man to be, proof that he is a good animal, quick in eye and
hand and hardy under weather. But of his gift Franz Ferdinand
made a murderous use. He liked to kill and kill and kill, unlike
men who shoot to get food or who have kept in touch with
the primitive life in which the original purpose of shooting is
remembered. Prodigious figures are given of the game that
fell to the double-barrelled Mannlicher rifles which were speci-
ally made for him. At a boar hunt given by Kaiser Wilhelm
sixty boars were let out, and Franz Ferdinand had the first
stand : fifty-nine fell dead, the sixtieth limped by on three legs.
At a Czech castle in one day’s sport he bagged two thousand
and one hundred and fifty pieces of small game. Not long
before his death he expressed satisfaction because he had
killed his three thousandth stag.

This capacity for butchery he used to express the hatred
which he felt for nearly all the world, which indeed, it is safe to
say, he bore against the whole world, except his wife and his

BOSNIA

341

two children. He had that sense of being betrayed by life
itself which comes to people who wrestle through long years
with a chronic and dangerous malady ; it- is strange that both
King Alexander of Yugoslavia and he had fought for half
their days against tuberculosis. But Franz Ferdinand had been
embittered by his environment, as Alexander was not. The
indiscipline and brutality of the officials who controlled the
Hapsburg court had been specially directed towards him. It
happened that for some years it looked as if Franz Ferdinand
would not recover from his illness, and during the whole of this
time the Department of the Lord High Steward, believing that
he would soon be dead, cut down his expenses to the quick in
order to get the praises of the Emperor Franz Josef for economy.
The poor wretch, penniless in spite of the great art collection.^
he had inherited, was grudged the most modest allowance, and
even his doctor was underpaid and insulted. This maltreatment
had ended when it became obvious that he was going to live, but
by that time his mind was set in a mould of hatred and resent-
ment, and though he could not shoot his enemies he found some
relief in shooting, it did not matter what.

Franz Ferdinand knew no shame in his exercise of this too
simple mechanism.. He was ungracious as only a man can be
who has never conceived the idea of graciousness. There was,
for example, his dispute with Count Henkel Donnersmark, the
German nobleman who was a wild young diplomat in Paris
before the Franco-Prussian war, returned there to negotiate
the terms of the indemnity, astonished the world by marrying
the cocotte La Paiva, and changed into a sober and far-seeing
industrialist on the grand scale. This elderly and distinguished
person had bought an estate in Silesia, and had made it pay for
itself by selling the full-grown timber and replacing it by a
careful scheme of reafforestation. This estate he leased to the
Archduke at a rent calculated on the assumption that so much
game existed on the property and would do so much damage
to the saplings. As the Archduke enormously increased the
stock of game, and practically no new trees could grow to
maturity, the Count very reasonably raised the rent. This the
Archduke, who had the wholly whimsical attitude to money
often found in royal personages, conceived to be a senseless
piece of greed. He gave notice to terminate his lease and
decided to punish the landlord by ruining the estate as a sporting

BLACK LAMB AND GREY FALCON

34*

property. The remainder of his tenancy he spent in organising
battues which drove all the beasts of the field up to his guns
to be slaughtered in such numbers that slaughter lost its mean-
ing, that the boundaiy between living and dying became
obscured, that dazed men forgot that they were killing. But
he and his staff found that the forces of life outnumbered them,
so he let part of the shoot to a Viennese manufacturer, a man
with whom he could not have brought himself to have rela-
tions for any other reason, on condition that he pursued the
same crusade of extermination. That, however, was still not
enough, and the employees of the hunt were set to kill off
what was left of the game by any means, abandoning all sporting
restraints. Because the forest still twitched with life, because
here and there the fern was trodden down and branches stirred
by survivors of the massacre, the Archduke suffered several
attacks of rage which disgusted all witnesses, being violent as
vomiting or colic.

It may be conceived therefore that, even as the game which
St. Julian Hospitaller had killed as a cruel hunter appeared
before him on the night when he was going to accomplish his
destiny and become the murderer of his father and mother, so
the half million beasts which had fallen to Franz Ferdinand’s
gun according to his own calculations were present that day in
the reception hall at Sarajevo. One can conceive the space of
this room stuffed all the way up to the crimson and gold vaults
and stalactites with the furred and feathered ghosts, set close,
because there were so many of them : stags with the air be-
tween their antlers stuffed with woodcock, quail, pheasant,
partridge, capercailzie and the like : boars standing bristling
flank to flank, the breadth under their broad bellies packed
with layer upon layer of hares and rabbits. Their animal eyes,
clear and dark as water, would brightly watch the approach of
their slayer to an end that exactly resembled their own. For
Franz Ferdinand’s greatness as a hunter had depended not only
on his pre-eminence as a shot, but on his power of organising
battues. He was specially proud of an improvement he had made
in the hunting of hare : his beaters, placed in a pear-shaped
formation, drove all the hares towards him so that he was able
without effort to exceed the bag of all other guns. Not a beast
that fell to him in these battues could have escaped by its own
strength or cunning, even if it had been a genius among its

BOSNIA

343

kind. The earth and sky were narrowed for it by the beaters
to just one spot, the spot where it must die ; and so it was with
this man. If by some miracle he had been able to turn round
and address the people in the room behind him not with his
usual aggressiveness and angularity but in terms which would
have made him acceptable to them as a suffering fellow-creature,
still they could not have saved him. If by some miracle his
slow-working and clumsy mind could have become swift and
subtle, it could not have shown him a safe road out of Sarajevo.
Long ago he himself, and the blood which was in his veins, had
placed at their posts the beaters who should drive him down
through a narrowing world to the spot where Princip’s bullet
would find him.

Through Franz Ferdinand’s mother, the hollow-eyed An-
nunziata, he was the grandson of King Bomba of the Sicilies,
one of the worst of the Bourbons, an idiot despot who conducted
a massacre of his subjects after 1848, and on being expelled
from Naples retired into a fortress and lived the life of a medieval
tyrant right on until the end of the fifties. This ancestry had
given Franz Ferdinand tuberculosis, obstinacy, bigotry, a habit
of suspicion, hatred of democracy and an itch for aggression,
which, combined with the Hapsburg narrowness and indis-
cipline, made him a human being who could not have hoped
to survive had he not been royal. When he went to Egypt to
spend the winter for the sake of his lungs it appeared to him
necessary, and nobody who knew him would have expected
anything else, to insult the Austrian Ambassador. By the
time he had passed through his twenties he had made an army
of personal enemies, which he constantly increased by his in-
temperate and uninstructed political hatreds. He hated Hun-
gary, the name of Kossuth made him spit with rage. When
receiving a deputation of Slovaks, though they were not a
people whom he would naturally have taken into his confidence,
he said of the Hungarians, *' It was an act of bad taste on the
part of these gentlemen ever to have come to Europe,” which
must remain an ace in the history of royal indiscretion.

He had a dream of replacing the Dual Monarchy by a
Triune Monarchy, in which the German and Czech crown
lands should form the first part, Hungary the second, and the
South Slav group — Croatia, Dalmatia and Bosnia and Herze-
govina — the third. This would have pleased the Croats, and

BLACK LAMB AND GREY FALCON

344

the Croats alone. Most German Austrians would have been
infuriated at having to combine with the Czechs and to see the
South Slavs treated as their equals ; Hungary would have
been enraged at losing her power over the South Slavs ; and
the non-Catholic South Slavs would have justly feared being
made the object of Catholic propaganda and would have
resented being cut off from their natural ambition of union
with the Serbs of Serbia. By this scheme, therefore, he made a
host of enemies ; and though he came in time to abandon it he
could not quickly turn these enemies into friends by making
public his change of mind. As he was the heir to the throne,
he could announce his policy only by the slow method of com-
municating it to private individuals.

He abandoned his plan of the Triune Monarchy, moreover,
for reasons too delicate to be freely discussed. In 1901, when
he was thirty-three, he had paid some duty calls on the Czech
home of his cousins, the Archduke Frederick and the Arch-
duchess Isabella, to see if he found one of their many daughters
acceptable as his bride. Instead he fell in love with the Arch-
duchess’s lady-in-waiting, Sophie Chotek, a woman of thirty-
two, noble but destitute. He insisted on marrying her in spite
of the agonised objection of the Emperor Franz Josef, who
pointed out to him that, according to the Hapsburg House Law,
the secret law of the Monarchy, a woman of such low birth
could not come to the throne as consort of the Emperor.

It was not a question of permission that could be bestowed
or withheld, but of a rigid legal fact. If Franz Ferdinand was
to marry Sophie Chotek at all he must do it morganatically,
and must renounce all rights of succession for the yet unborn
children of their marriage ; he could no more marry her any
other way than a man with a living and undivorced wife can
marry a second woman, though the infringement here was of an
unpublished dynastic regulation instead of the published law.
But some mitigation of this severe judgment came from an
unexpected quarter. The younger Kossuth declared that,
according to Hungarian law, when the Archduke ascended the
throne his wife, no matter what her origin, became Queen of
Hungary, and his children must enjoy the full rights of suc-
cession. This weakened the vehemence of Franz Ferdinand’s
loathing for Hungary, though not for individual Hungarians.
He still meant to revise the constitutional machinery of the

BOSNIA

345

Dual Monarchy, but he no longer wished to punish the
Hungarians quite so harshly as to take away from them the
Croats and Slovaks. But this was not a consideration he could
publicly name. Nor, for diplomatic reasons, could he confess
later that he was becoming more and more fearful of the growing
strength of Serbia, and was apprehensive lest a union of South
Slav provinces should tempt her ambition and provide her with
a unified ally. So, by his promulgation of an unpopular policy,
and his inability to announce his abandonment of it, the first
beaters were put down to the battue.

His marriage set others at their post. Franz Ferdinand
had far too dull a mind to appreciate the need for consistency.
That was once visibly demonstrated in relation to his passion
for collecting antiques, which he bought eagerly and without
discrimination. When he paid a visit to a country church, the
simple priest boasted to him of a good bargain he had driven
with a Jew dealer, who had given him a brand-new altar in
exchange for his shabby old one. Immediately Franz Ferdinand
sat down and wrote to the Bishop of the diocese asking him to
give his clergy an order not to part with Church property.
But he was quite amazed when later this order prevented him
from carrying out the sacrilegious purchase of a tombstone
which he wished to put in his private chapel. He showed a
like inconsistency in regard to his marriage. His whole life
was based on the privileges that were given to the members of
the Hapsburg family because the Hapsburgs had been preserved
in a certain state of genealogical purity which Austria had
agreed to consider valuable. He could not understand that,
as this purity was the justification of those privileges, they could
not be extended to people in whom the Hapsburg blood had
been polluted. He took it as a personal insult, a bitter, cause-
less hurt, that his wife and his children should not be given
royal honours.

Nor did his inconsistencies end there. Himself a typical
product of Hapsburg indiscipline, he nevertheless made no
allowances when his relatives and the officials of the court
reacted to his marriage with a like indiscipline. He had here,
indeed, a legitimate object for hatred, in a character as strange
as his own. Franz Josef’s Chamberlain, Prince Montenuovo,
was one of the strangest figures in Europe of our time ; a
character that Shakespeare decided at the last moment not to use

346 BLACK LAMB AND GREY FALCON

in King Lear or Othello, and laid by so carelessly that it fell out
of art into life. He was a man of exquisite taste and aesthetic
courage, who protected the artists of Vienna against the apathy
of the court and the imprudence of the bourgeoisie. The
Vienna Philharmonic under Mahler was his special pride and
care. But he was the son of one of the bastard sons mothered
by the wretched Marie Louise, when, unsustained by the opinion
of historians yet unborn that she was and should have been
perfectly happy in her forced marriage with Napoleon, she took
refuge in the arms of Baron Niepperg. To be the bastard son
of a race which was so great that it could make bastardy as noble
as legitimacy, but which was great only because its legitimacy
was untainted with bastardy, confused this imaginative man with
a passionate and poetic and malignant madness. He watched
over the rules of Hapsburg ceremonial as over a case of p>oisons
which he believed to compose the elixir of life if they were com-
bined in the correct proportions. “ And now for the strychnine,”
he must have said, when it became his duty to devise the
adjustments made necessary by the presence at the court of a
morganatic wife to the heir of the throne. Countess Sophie
was excluded altogether from most intimate functions of the
Austrian court ; she could not accompany her husband to the
family receptions or parties given for foreign royalties, or even
to the most exclusive kinds of court balls ; at the semi-public
kind of court balls which she was allowed to attend her husband
had to head the procession with an Archduchess on his arm,
while she was forced to walk at the very end, behind the youngest
princess. The Emperor did what he could to mitigate the situa-
tion by creating her the Duchess of Hohenberg: but the
obsessed Montenuovo hovered over her, striving to exacerbate
every possible humiliation, never happier than when he could
hold her back from entering a court carriage or cutting down
to the minimum the salutes and attendants called for by any
State occasion.

It is possible that had Franz Ferdinand been a different
kind of man he might have evoked a sympathy which would have
consoled him and his wife for these hardships ; but all his ways
were repellent. When his brother, Ferdinand Charles, a gentle
soul with literary tastes, doomed to an early death from con-
sumption, fell in love with a woman not of royal rank, Franz
Ferdinand was the first to oppose the misalliance and made

BOSNIA

347

violent scenes with the invalid. When it was pointed out that
he had married for love he answered angrily that there could
be no comparison between the two cases, because Sophie
Chotek was an aristocrat and his brother’s wife was the daughter
of a university professor. Such lack of humour, which amounts
to a lack of humours in the Elizabethan sense, isolated him from
all friends, so instead he created partisans. He had been
given, for his Viennese home, the superb palace and park
known as the Belvedere, which had been built by Prince Eugene
of Savoy. He now made it the centre of what the historian
Tschuppik has called a shadow government. He set up a
military Chancellery of his own ; and presently the Emperor
Franz Josef, who always treated his nephew with an even
remarkable degree of tenderness and forbearance, though not
with tact, resigned to this his control over the army. But the
Chancellery dealt with much more than military matters. Franz
Ferdinand attracted every able man in Austria who had been
ignored or rejected by the court of Franz Josef, and thanks to
the stupidity and bad manners of that court these were not
contemptible in quality or inconsiderable in numbers. Helped
by Franz Ferdinand to form a running point-by-point opposition
to the mild policy of Franz Josef, these men carried into eflFect
his faith in half measures ; and they drafted a programme
for him which was indiscreetly spoken of as a scheme of reform
designed for preventing the dissolution of the Austro-Hungarian
Empire, to be applied as soon as Franz Josef was dead and
Franz Ferdinand had ascended the throne.

This way of life set still more beaters around him. It
automatically roused the animosity of all at the court of Franz
Josef, and many of his own partisans became his overt or
covert enemies. He became day by day less lovable. His
knowledge that he could not leave the royal path of his future
to his children made him fanatically mean and grasping, and
his manner became more and more overbearing and brutal.
He roused in small men small resentments, and, in the minds
of the really able men, large distrust. They realised that though
he was shrewd enough to see that the Austro-Hungarian Empire
was falling to pieces when most of his kind were wholly blind
to its decay, he was fundamentally stupid and cruel and saw
his problem as merely that of selecting the proper objects for
tyranny. Some of them feared a resort to medieval oppression :

348 BLACK LAMB AND GREY FALCON

some feared the damage done to specific interests, particularly
in Hungary, which was bound to follow his resettlement of the
empire. Such fears must have gained in intensity when it
became evident that Kaiser Wilhelm of Germany was taking
more and more interest in Franz Ferdinand, and was visiting
him at his country homes and holding long conversations with
him on important matters. The last visit of this kind had
occurred a fortnight before the Archduke had come to Sarajevo.
There is a rumour that on that occasion the Kaiser laid before
Franz Ferdinand a plan for remaking the map of Europe. The
Austro-Hungarian and German empires were to be friends, and
Franz Ferdinand’s eldest son was to become king of a new
Poland stretching from the Baltic to the Black Sea, while the
second son became King of Bohemia, Hungary, Croatia and
Serbia, and Franz Ferdinand’s official heir, his nephew Charles,
was left as King of German Austria. It is certain that Kaiser
Wilhelm must, at that moment, have had many important
things on his mind, and that it is hardly likely that he would
have paid such a visit unless he had something grave to say.
It is definitely known that on this occasion Franz Ferdinand
expressed bitter hostility to the Hungarian aristocracy. It is
also known that these remarks were repeated at the time by
the Kaiser to a third person.

The manners of Franz Ferdinand did worse for him than
make him enemies. They made him the gangster friends that
may become enemies at any moment, with the deadly weapon of
a friend’s close knowledge. Franz Ferdinand’s plainest sign of
intelligence was his capacity for recognising a certain type of
unscrupulous ability. He had discovered Aerenthal, the clever
trickster who as Austrian Minister had managed to convert
the provisional occupation of Bosnia and Herzegovina into
annexation behind the backs of the other great powers in igo8.
Since Aerenthal on his deathbed had recommended Berchtold
to succeed him, that incompetent war-monger might also be
counted as one of the works of Franz Ferdinand. But an
even greater favourite of his was Conrad von Hotzendorf,
whom he made the Chief of General Staff. This creature,
who was without sense or bowels, fancied himself not only as
a great soldier but as a statesman, and would have directed the
foreign policy of his country had he been allowed. He was
obsessed by the need of preserving the Austro-Hungarian

BOSNIA

349

Empire by an offensive against Serbia. " Lest all our pre<
destined foes, having perfected their armaments should deliver
a blow against Austria-Hungary,” he wrote in a memorandum
he presented to Franz Josef in 1907 which was followed by many
like it, " we must take the first opportunity of settling accounts
with our most vulnerable enemy.” In the intervening seven
years this obsession fiamed up into a mania. In 191 1 Franz
Josef, with the definite statements that “ my policy is pacific ”,
and that he would permit no question of an offensive war,
obtained Aerenthal’s consent and dismissed Conrad from his
post, making him an Inspector-General of the Army. But Franz
Ferdinand still stood by him, and so did all the partisans of
the Belvedere, who numbered enough industrialists, bankers,
journalists and politicians to make plain the decadence of pre-
war Vienna. Berchtold was so much impressed by Conrad
that in 1912 he was once more appointed Chief of General Staff.
He was preaching the same gospel. “ The way out of our diffi-
culties,” he wrote to Berchtold, “ b to lay Serbia low without
fear of consequences."

But at this time Franz Ferdinand’s convictions took a new
turn. He was becoming more and more subject to the influ-
ence of the German Kaiser, and Germany had no desire at
that time for war, particularly with a Balkan pretext. He
admired the Germans and thought they probably knew their
business. This infuriated Conrad, who thought that Franz
Ferdinand ought to persuade Germany to support Austria, so
that he could feel confident even if their offensive war against
Serbia spread into a general conflagration, which shows that
he knew what he was doing. But in 1913 Berchtold had to
tell Conrad, " The Archduke Franz Ferdinand is absolutely
against war.” At this Conrad became more and more desperate.
His influence over Berchtold had been sufficient to make him
refuse to see the Prime Minister of Serbia when he offered to
come to Vienna to negotiate a treaty with Austria, covering all
possible points of dispute. He persuaded Berchtold, moreover,
to withhold all knowledge of this pacific offer from either Franz
Josef or Franz Ferdinand. This is the great criminal act which
gives us the right to curse Berchtold and Conrad as the true
instigators of the World War. But Conrad was no less crude
when in 1913 he used a trifling incident on the Dalmatian coast
to attempt to get the Emperor Franz Josef to mobilise against

BLACK LAMB AND GREY FALCON

3SO

Serbia and Montenegro. This coercion Franz Josef, with a
firmness remarkable in a man of eighty-seven, quietly resisted,
even though Berchtold supported Conrad, and this time Franz
Ferdinand was in agreement with the old man.

Shortly after this another incident lowered Conrad’s stock
still further. Colonel Redl, the Chief of General Staff to the
Fjrague Corps, who had been head of the Austrian espionage
service, was found to be a spy in the pay of Russia. He was a
homosexual, and had fallen into the hands of blackmailers.
He was handed a loaded revolver by a brother officer and left
alone to commit suicide. This caused Franz Ferdinand to fly
into one of his terrible attacks of rage against Conrad, who
had been responsible both for Redl’s appointment to the
espionage department and for the manner of his death. He was
incensed that a homosexual should have been given such a
position partly for moral reasons, and partly because of the
special liability of such men to blackmail ; and it offended his
religious convictions that any man should have been forced to
commit suicide. This last was hardly a fair charge to bring
against Conrad, since the loaded revolver was an established
Army convention in the case of shameful offences. But thence-
forward the two men were enemies.

There was no doubt about this after the autumn of 1913.
At the Army manoeuvres in Bohemia Franz Ferdinand grossly
insulted and humiliated his former friend, but refused to
accept his resignation. He however made it clear that the only
reason for the refusal was fear of a bad effect on the public
mind. In June 1914 Conrad was eating his heart out in dis-
appointment, bearing a private and public grudge against the
man who had disgraced him and who would not engage in the
war against Serbia which he himself believed necessary for his
country’s salvation.

It must be realised that he was a very relentless man. He
himself has told of a conversation he had with Berchtold about
the unhappy German prince, William of Wied, who was sent
to be King of Albania. “ Let us hope there will be no hitch,”
said Berchtold ; ” but what shall we do if there is ? ”

“ Nothing at all,” said Conrad. “ But what if the prince is
assassinated ? ” asked Berchtold. *' Even then we can do
nothing,” said Conrad. “ Somebody else must take the throne
in his place. Anybody will suit us as long as he is not under

BOSNIA

351

foreign influence.” The conversation is the more grievous
when it is understood that they had just refused William ot
Wied’s very reasonable request that he might live on a yacht
rather than lodge among his reluctant subjects.

Such enemies surrounded Franz Ferdinand ; but it cannot
be laid at their door that he had come to Sarajevo on June the
twenty-eighth, 1914. This was a day of some personal signifi-
cance to him. On that date in 1900 he had gone to the Hofburg
in the presence of the Emperor and the whole court, and all
holders of office, and had, in choking tones, taken the oath to
renounce the royal rights of his unborn children. But it was
also a day of immense significance for the South Slav people.
It is the feast-day of St. Vitus, who is one of those saints who
are lucky to find a place in the Christian calendar, since they
started life as pagan deities ; he was originally Vidd, a Finnish-
Ugric deity. It is also the armiversary of the battle of Kossovo,
where five centuries before the Serbs had lost their empire to
the Turk. It had been a day of holy mourning for the Serbian
people within the Serbian kingdom and the Austrian Empire,
when they had confronted their disgrace and vowed to redeem
it, until the year 1912, when Serbia’s victory over the Turks at
Kumanovo wiped it out. But, since 1913 had still been a time
of war, the St. Vitus’ Day of 1914 was the first anniversary
which might have been celebrated by the Serbs in joy and pride.
Franz Ferdinand must have been well aware that he was Imown
as an enemy of Serbia. He must have known that if he went to
Bosnia and conducted manoeuvres on the Serbian frontier just
before St. Vitus’ Day and on the actual anniversary paid a
State visit to Sarajevo, he would be understood to be mocking
the South Slav world, to be telling them that though the Serbs
might have freed themselves from the Turks there were still
many Slavs under the Austrian’s yoke.

To pay that visit was an act so suicidal that one fumbles
the pages of the histoiy books to find if there is not some explana-
tion of his going, if he was not subject to some compulsion.
But if ever a man went anywhere of his own free will, Franz
Ferdinand went so to Sarajevo. He himself ordered the
manoeuvres and decided to attend them. The Emperor Franz
Josef, in the presence of witnesses, told him that he need not
go unless he wished. Yet it appears inconceivable that he should
not have known that the whole of Bosnia was seething with

35a BLACK LAMB AND GREY FALCON

revolt, and that almost every schoolboy and student in the
province was a member of some revolutionary society. Even
if the extraordinary isolation that afflicts royal personages had
previously prevented him from sharing this common knowledge,
steps were taken to remove his ignorance. But here his tempera-
ment intervened on behalf of his own death. The Serbian
Government — which by this single act acquitted itself of all
moral blame for the assassination — sent its Minister in Vienna
to warn Bilinski, the Joint Finance Minister, who was re-
sponsible for the civil administration of Bosnia and Herzegovina,
that the proposed visit of Franz Ferdinand would enrage many
Slavs on both sides of the frontier and might cause consequences
which neither Government could control. But Bilinski was an
Austrian Pole ; Ferdinand loathed all his race, and had bitterly
expressed his resentment that any of them were allowed to hold
high office. Bilinski was also a close confidant of old Franz
Josef and an advocate of a conciliatory policy in the Slav
provinces. Thus it happened that, when he conscientiously went
to transmit this message, his warnings were received not only
with incredulity but in a way that made it both psychologically
and materially impossible to repeat them.

Franz Ferdinand never informed in advance either the
Austrian or the Hungarian Government of the arrangements he
had made with the Army to visit Bosnia, and he seems to have
worked earnestly and ingeniously, as people will to get up a
bazaar, to insult the civil authorities. When he printed the
programme of his journey he sent it to all the Ministries except
the Joint Ministry of Finance ; and he ordered that no invita-
tions for the ball which he was to give after the manoeuvres out-
side Sarajevo at Ilidzhe, were to be sent to any of the Finance
Ministry officials. It is as if a Prince of Wales had travelled
through India brutally insulting the Indian Civil Service and
the India Office. There was a thoroughly Hapsburg reason
for this. Since the military authorities were in charge of all
the arrangements, it had been easy for Franz Ferdinand to
arrange that for the first time on Hapsburg territory royal
honours would be paid to his wife. This could not have
happened without much more discussion if the civil authorities
had been involved. The result was final and bloody. Bilinski
could not protest against Franz Ferdinand’s visit to Sarajevo
when he was not sure it was going to take place, considering

BOSNIA

3S3

the indelicate rag^ with which all his approaches were met.
This inability to discuss the visit meant that he could not even
supervise the arrangements for policing the streets. With in-
credible ingenuity, Franz Ferdinand had created a situation
in which those whose business it was to protect him could not
take one step towards his protection.

When Franz Ferdinand returned from the balcony into the
reception room his face became radiant and serene, because
he saw before him the final agent of his ruin, the key beater
in this battue. His wife had been in an upper room of the
Town Hall, meeting a number of ladies belonging to the chief
Moslem families of the town, in order that she might con-
descendingly admire their costumes and manners, as is the
habit of barbarians who have conquered an ancient culture ; and
she had now made the proposal that on the return journey she
and her husband should alter their programme by going to the
hospital to make enquiries about the officer wounded by Chab-
rinovitch. Nothing can ever be known about the attitude of
this woman to that day’s events. She was a woman who could
not communicate with her fellow-creatures. We know only of
her outer appearance and behaviour. We know that she had an
anaphrodisiac and pinched yet heavy face, that in a day when
women were bred to look like table-birds she took this con-
vention of amplitude and expressed it with the rigidity of the
drill sergeant. We know that she impressed those who knew
her as absorbed in snobbish ambitions and petty resentments,
and that she had as her chief ingratiating attribute a talent for
mimicry, which is often the sport of an unloving and derisive soul.

But we also know that she and Franz Ferdinand felt for each
other what cannot be denied to have been a great love. Each
found in the other a perpetual assurance that the meaning of
life is kind ; each gave the other that assurance in terms suited
to their changing circumstances and with inexhaustible re-
sourcefulness and good-will ; it is believed by those who knew
them best that neither of them ever fell from the heights of
their relationship and reproached the other for the hardships
that their marriage had brought upon them. That is to say
that the boar we know as Franz Ferdinand and the small-
minded fury we know as Countess Sophie Chotek are not the
ultimate truth about these people. These were the pragmatic
conceptions of them that those who met them had to use if they

BLACK LAMB AND GREY FALCON

354

were to escape unhurt, but the whole truth about their natures
must certainly have been to some degree beautiful.

Even in this field where Sophie Chotek’s beauty lay she
was dangerous. Like her husband she could see no point in
consistency, which is the very mortar of society. Because of her
noble birth she bitterly resented her position as a morganatic
wife. It was infamous, she felt, that a Chotek should be treated
in this way. It never occurred to her that Choteks had a value
only because they had been accorded it by a system which, for
reasons that were perfectly valid at the time, accorded the Haps-
burgs a greater value ; and that if those reasons had ceased
to be valid and the Hapsburgs should no longer be treated as
supreme, then the Choteks also had lost their claim to eminence.

Unfortunately she coupled with this inconsistency a severely
legalistic mind. It can be done. The English bench has given
us examples. She had discovered, and is said to have urged
her discovery on Franz Ferdinand, that the oath he had taken
to renounce the rights of succession for his children was contrary
to Crown Law. No one can swear an oath which affects the
unborn ; this is, of course, perfectly just. It did not occur to her
that, if the maintenance of the Hapsburgs required the taking of
unjust oaths, perhaps the Hapsburg dynasty would fall to pieces
if it were forced to live on the plane of highest justice, and that
her children might find themselves again without a throne.

Countess Sophie Chotek must therefore have had her hands
full of the complicated hells of the humourless legalist ; it must
have seemed to her that her environment was always perversely
resisting the imposition of a perfect pattern, to her grave per-
sonal damage. She had, however, a more poignant personal
grief. She believed Franz Ferdinand to be on the point of going
mad. It is on record that she hinted to her family lawyer and
explicitly informed an intimate friend that in her opinion her
husband might at any moment be stricken with some form of
mental disorder. This may have been merely part of that corpus
of criticism which might be called " Any Wife to any Husband ”.
But there were current many stories which go to show that
Franz Ferdinand's violence had for some time been manifest
in ways not compatible with sanity. The Czech officials in
charge of the imperial train that had brought Franz Ferdinand -
from Berlin after a visit to the German Emperor reported to
the chief of the Czech separatist party that when Franz Ferdi-

BOSNIA

3SS

nand had alight^ at his destination they found the upholstery
in his compartment cut to pieces by sword thrusts ; and in a visit
to England he struck those who met him as undisciplined in a
way differing in quality and degree from the normal abnormality
which comes from high rank.

This woman had therefore a host of enemies without her
home, and within it an enemy more terrifying than all the rest.
That she was in great distress is proven by a certain difficulty
we know to have arisen in her religious life. It was one of the
wise provisions of the Early Church that the orthodox were not
allowed the benefits of communion or confession except at rare
intervals. There is obviously a sound and sensible reason for
this rule. It cannot be believed that the soul is sufficiently
potent to be for ever consummating its union with God, and the
forgiveness of sins must lose its reality if it is sought too rapidly
for judgment to pronounce soberly on guilt. Moreover limiting
the approach to the sacraments prevents them from becoming
magical practices, mere snatchings at amulets. By one of the
innovations which divide the Roman Catholic Church from the
Early Church, Pope Leo X removed all these restrictions, and
now a devotee can communicate and confess as often as he likes.
But the Countess Sophie Chotek availed herself of this per-
mission so extremely often that she was constantly at odds with
the Bishop who guided her spiritual life. At their hotel out at
Ilidzhe a room had been arranged as a chapel, and that morning
she and her husband had attended Mass. Not one day could go
without invoking the protection of the Cross against the disaster
which she finally provoked by her proposal that they should
visit the wounded aide-de-camp in hospital.

There was a conversation about this proposal which can
never be understood. It would be comprehensible only if the
speakers had been drunk or living through a long fevered night ;
but they were sober and, though they were facing horror, they
were facing it at ten o’clock on a June morning. Franz Ferdi-
nand actually asked Potiorek if he thought any bombs would
be thrown at them during their drive away from the Town Hall.
This question is incredibly imbecile. If Potiorek had not known
enough to regard the first attack as probable, there was no reason
to ascribe any value whatsoever to his opinion on the probability
of a second attack. There was one obvious suggestion which
it would have been natural for either Franz Ferdinand or

3S6 black lamb AND GREY FALCON

Potiorek to make. The streets were quite inadequately guarded,
otherwise Chabrinovitch could not have made his attack.
Therefore it was advisable that Franz Ferdinand and his wife
should remain at the Town Hall until adequate numbers of the
seventy thousand troops who were within no great distance of
the town were sent for to line the streets. This is a plan which
one would have thought would have been instantly brought to
the men’s minds by the mere fact that they were responsible for
the safety of a woman.

But they never suggested anything like it, and Potiorek gave
to FranzFerdinand’s astonishing question the astonishing answer
that he was sure no second attack would be made. The startling
element in this answer is its imprudence, for he must have known
that any investigation would bring to light that he had failed to
take for Franz Ferdinand any of the precautions that had been
taken for Franz Josef on his visit to Sarajevo seven years before,
when all strangers had been evacuated from the town, all anti-
Austrians confined to their houses, and the streets lined with a
double cordon of troops and peppered with detectives. It would
be credible only if one knew that Potiorek had received assur-
ances that if anything happened to Franz Ferdinand there
would be no investigation afterwards that he need fear. Indeed,
it would be easy to suspect that Potiorek deliberately sent Franz
Ferdinand to his death, were it not that it must have looked
beforehand as if that death must be shared by Potiorek, as they
were both riding in the same carriage. It is of course true that
Potiorek shared Conrad’s belief that a war against Serbia was
a sacred necessity, and had written to him on one occasion
expressing the desperate opinion that, rather than not have war,
he would run the risk of provoking a world war and being
defeated in it ; and throughout the Bosnian manoeuvres he had
been in the company of Conrad, who was still thoroughly dis-
gruntled by his dismissal by Franz Ferdinand. It must have
been quite plain to them both that the assassination of Franz
Ferdinand by a Bosnian Serb would be a superb excuse for
declaring war on Serbia. Still, it is hard to believe that Potiorek
would have risked his own life to take Franz Ferdinand’s, for
he could easily have arranged for the Archduke’s assassination
when he was walking in the open country. It is also extremely
doubtful if any conspirators would have consented to Potiorek
risking his life, for his influence and military skill would have

BOSNIA

357

been too useful to them to throw away.

Yet there is an incident arising out of this conversation
which can only be explained by the existence of entirely relent-
less treachery somewhere among Franz Ferdinand’s entourage.
It was agreed that the royal party should, on leaving the Town
Hall, follow the route that had been originally announced for
only a few hundred yards ; they would drive along the quay
to the second bridge, and would then follow a new route by
keeping straight along the quay to the hospital, instead of turning
to the right and going up a side street which led to the principal
shopping centre of the town. This had the prime advantage of
disappointing any other conspirators who might be waiting in
the crowds, after any but the first few hundred yards of the
route, and, as Potiorek had also promised that the automobiles
should travel at a faster speed, it might have been thought that
the Archduke and his wife had a reasonable chance of getting
out of Sarajevo alive. So they might, if anybody had given
orders to the chauffeur on either of these points. But either
Potiorek never gave these orders to any subordinate, or the
subordinate to whom he entrusted them never handed them on.

Neither hypothesis is easy to accept. Even allowing for
Austrian Seklamperei, soldiers and persons in attendance on
royalty do not make such mistakes. But though this negligence
cannot have been accidental, the part it played in contriving the
death of Franz Ferdinand cannot have been foreseen. The
Archduke, his wife, and Potiorek left the Town Hall, taking no
farewell whatsoever of the municipal officers who lined the stair-
case, and went on to the quay and got into their automobile.
Franz Ferdinand and Sophie are said to have looked stunned and
stiff with apprehension. Count Harrach, an Austrian general,
jumped on the left running-board and crouched there with
drawn sword, ready to defend the royal pair with his life. The'
procession was headed by an automobile containing the Deputy
Mayor and a member of the Bosnian Diet ; but by another
incredible blunder neither these officials nor their chauffeurs
were informed of the change in route. When this first auto-
mobile came to the bridge it turned to the right and went up'
the side street. The chauffeur of the royal car saw this and was
therefore utterly bewildered when Potiorek struck him on the
shoulder and shouted, " What arc you doing ? We’re going
the wrong way I We must drive straight along the quay.”

VOL. 1 2A

358 BLACK LAMB AND GREY FALCON

Not having been told how supremely important it was to
keep going, the puzzled chauffeur stopped dead athwart the
comer of the side street and the quay. He came to halt exactly
in front of a young Bosnian Serb named Gavrilo Princip, who
was one of the members of the same conspiracy as Chabrino*
vitch. He had failed to draw his revolver on the Archduke
during the journey to the Town Hall, and he had come back
to make another attempt. As the automobile remained stock-
still Princip was able to take steady aim and shoot Franz
Ferdinand in the heart. He was not a very good shot, he could
never have brought down his quarry if there had not been this
failure to give the chauffeur proper instructions. Harrach could
do nothing ; he was on the left side of the car, Princip on the
right. When he saw the stout, stuffed body of the Archduke
fall forward he shifted his revolver to take aim at Potiorek. He
would have killed him at once had not Sophie thrown herself
across the car in one last expression of her great love, and
drawn Franz Ferdinand to herself with a movement that brought
her across the path of the second bullet. She was already dead
when Franz Ferdinand murmured to her, " Sophie, Sophie, live
for our children " ; and he died a quarter of an hour later. So
was your life and my life mortally wounded, but so was not the
life of the Bosnians, who were indeed restored to life by this act
of death.

Leaning from the balcony, I said, '' I shall never be able to
understand how it happened.” It is not that there are too few
facts available, but that there are too many. To begin with,
only one murder was committed, yet there were two murders
in the story ; one was the murder done by Princip, the other
was the murder dreamed of by some person or persons in
Franz Ferdinand’s entourage, and they were not the same. And
the character of the event is not stamped with murder but with
suicide. Nobody worked to ensure the murder on either side
so hard as the people who were murdered. And they, though
murdered, are not as pitiable as victims should be. They
manifested a mixture of obstinate invocation of disaster and
anguished complaint against it which is often associated with
unsuccessful crime, with the petty thief in the dock. Yet they
were of their time. They could not be blamed for morbidity in
a society which adored death, which found joy in contemplating
the death of beasts, the death of souls in a rigid social system.

BOSNIA

359

the death of peoples under an oppressive empire.

" Many things happened that day,” said the head of the
tourist bureau, ” but most clearly 1 remember the funny thin
voice of the Archduke and his marionette strut.” I looked
down on the street below and saw one who was not as the
Archduke, a tall gaunt man from the mountains with his crimson
scarf about his head, walking with a long stride that was the
sober dance of strength itself. 1 said to Constantine, ” Did
that sort of man have anything to do with the assassination ? "
“ Directly, nothing at all,” answered Constantine, “ though
indirectly he had everything to do with it. But in fact all of
the actual conspirators were peculiarly of Sarajevo, a local
product. You will understand better when I have shown you
where it all happened. But now we must go back to the tourist
bureau, for we cannot leave this gentleman until we have drunk
black coffee with him."

As we walked out of the Town Hall the sunshine was at
last warm and the plum blossom in the distant gardens shone
as if it were not still wet with melted snow. ” Though the hills
rise so sharply,” I said, ” the contours are so soft, to be in this
city is like walking inside an opening flower.” " Everything
here is perfect,” said Constantine ; “ and think of it, only since
I was a grown man has this been my town. Until then its
beauty was a heartache and a shame to me, because I was a
Serb and Sarajevo was a Slav town in captivity.” " Come
now, come now," I said, “ by that same reckoning should not
the beauty of New York and Boston be a heartache and shame
to me ? ” " Not at all, not at all,” he said, " for you and the
Americans jire not the same people. The air of America is
utterly different from the air of England, and has made
Americans even of pure English blood utterly different from
you, even as the air of Russia, which is not the same as Balkan
air, has made our Russian brothers not at all as we are. But the
air of Bosnia is the same as Serbian air, and these people are
almost the same as us, except that they talk less. Besides, your
relatives in America are not being governed by another race,
wholly antipathetic to you both. If the Germans had taken
the United States and you went over there and saw New England
villages being governed on Prussian lines, then you would sigh
that you and the Americans of your race should be together
again.” " I see that,” I said. I was looking at the great

36o black lamb AND GREY FALCON

toast-coloured barracks which the Austrians set on a ledge
dominating the town. They seemed to say, “ All is now
known, we can therefore act without any further discussion ” ;
a statement idiotic in itself, and more so when addressed to the
essentially speculative Slav.

“ All, I tell you,” said Constantine, " that is Austrian in
Sarajevo is false to us. Look at this embankment we are
walking upon. It is very nice and straight, but it is nothing
like the embankment we Yugoslavs, Christian or Moslem,
would make for a river. We are very fond of Nature as she is,
and we do not want to hold up a ruler and tell her that she must
look like that and not stick forward her bosom or back her
bottom. And look, here is the comer where Princip killed the
Archduke, and you see how appropriate it was. For the young
Bosnian came along the little street from the real Sarajevo,
where all the streets are narrow and many are winding and
every house belongs to a person, to this esplanade which the
Austrians build, which is one long line and has big houses that
look alike, and seeing an Arch-Austrian he made him go away.
See, there is a tablet on that comer commemorating the deed.”

I had read much abuse of this tablet as a barbarous record
of satisfaction in an accomplished crime. Mr. Winston Churchill
remarks in his book on The Unknown War {The Eastern
Front) that “ Princip died in prison, and a monument erected
in recent years by his fellow-countrymen records his infamy
and their own ”. It is actually a very modest black tablet, not
more than would be necessary to record the exact spot of the
assassination for historical purposes, and it is placed so high
above the street-level that the casual passer-by would not
remark it. The inscription runs, “ Here, in this historic spot
Gavrilo Princip was the initiator of liberty, on the day of St.
Vitus, the 28th of June, 1914 ”. These words seem to me
remarkable in their restraint, considering the bitter hatred that
the rule of Austria had aroused in Bosnia. The expression
" initiator of liberty ” is justified by its literal truth : the Bosnians
and Herzegovinians were in fact enslaved until the end of the
war which was provoked by the assassination of the Archduke
Franz Ferdinand. To be shocked at a candid statement of this
hardly becomes a subject of any of the Western states who
connived at the annexation of these territories by Austria.

One must let the person who wears the shoe know where it

BOSNIA

361

pinches. It happened that as Constantine and I were looking
up at the tablet Aere passed by one of the most notable men in
Yugoslavia, a scholar and a gentleman, known to his peers in
all the great cities of Europe. He greeted us and nodded up
at the tablet, “ A bad business that." “ Yes, yes,” said Con-
stantine warily, for they were political enemies, and he dreaded
what might come. " We must have no more of such things,
Constantine,” said the other. “ No, no,” said Constantine.
” No more assassinations, Constantine,” the other went on.
“ No, no,” said Constantine. ” And no more Croats shot
down because they are Croats, Constantine,” rapped out the
other. "But we never do that,” wailed Constantine; "it is
only that accidents must happen in the disorder that these
people provoke ! ” " Well, there must be no more accidents,”
said his friend. But as he turned to go he looked again at the
tablet, and his eyes grew sad. " But God forgive us all I ” he
said. " As for that accident, it had to happen.”

I said to Constantine, “ Would he have known Princip, do
you think ? " But Constantine answered, " I think not. He
was ten years older, and he would only have known a man of
Princip’s age if their families had been friends, but poor Princip
had no family of the sort that had such rich friends. He was
just a poor boy come down from the mountains to get his
education here in Sarajevo, and he knew nobody but his school-
fellows.” That, indeed, is a fact which is of great significance
historically : the youth and obscurity of the Sarajevo con-
spirators. Princip himself was the grandson of an immigrant
whose exact origin is unknown, though he was certainly a Slav.
This stranger appeared in a village on the borders of Bosnia
and Dalmatia at a time when the Moslems of true Turkish
stock had been driven out by the Bosnian insurrectionary forces,
and occupied one of the houses that had been vacated by the
Turks. There must have been something a little odd about
this man, for he wore a curious kind of silver jacket with bells
on it, which struck the villagers as strange and gorgeous, and
which cannot be identified by the experts as forming part of any
local costume known in the Balkans. Because of this eccentric
garment the villagers gave him the nickname of “ Princip ”,
which means Prince ; and because of that name there sprang
up after the assassination a preposterous legend that Princip’s
father was the illegitimate son of the murdered Prince Rudolf.

36a BLACK LAMB AND GREY FALCON

He was certainly just a peasant, who married a woman of that
Homeric people, the Montenegrins, and begot a family in the
depths of poverty. When Austria came in and seized Bosnia
after it had been cleared of Turks by the Bosnian rebels, it
was careful to leave the land tenure system exactly as it had
been under the Turks, and the Bosnian peasants continued
on starvation level. Of Princip’s children, one son became
a postman, and married a Herzegovinian who seems to have
been a woman most remarkable for strength of character. In
her barren mountain home she bore nine children, of whom
six died, it is believed from maladies arising out of under-
nourishment. The other three sons she filled with an ambition
to do something in life, and sent them down into the towns to
get an education and at the same time to earn money to pay
for it. The first became a doctor, the second a tradesman who
was chosen at an early age mayor of his town. The third was
Gavrilo Princip, who started on his journey under two handicaps.
He was physically fragile, and he entered a world distracted
with thoughts of revolution and preparations for war.

The two most oppressive autocracies in Europe were working
full time to supply themselves and all other European countries
with the material of revolution. Russia was producing in-
numerable authors who dealt in revolutionary thought. The
Austrian Empire was producing innumerable men who were
capable of any revolutionary act, whether in the interests of
military tyranny or popular liberty. The Russian influence
came into Bosnia through several channels, some of them most
unexpected. For political purposes the Russian imperial family
maintained a boarding school for girls at the top of the road
from Kotor, in Tsetinye, the capital of Montenegro, where many
of the aristocratic families of Dalmatia and Bosnia and Herze-
govina and even Croatia sent their daughters to be educated.
As all familiar with the perversity of youth would expect, the
little dears later put to use the Russian they acquired at that
institution to read Stepniak, and Kropotkin and Tolstoy. This
was but a narrow channel, which served only to gain tolerance
among the wealthier classes for the movement which swept
through practically the whole of the male youth of the Southern
Slavs and set them discussing Nihilism, Anarchism and State
Socialism, and experimenting with the technique of terrorism
which the advocates of those ideas had developed in Russia.

BOSNIA

363

In this last and least attractive part of their activities the
Bosnians show at a disadvantage compared to their Russian
brothers during the period immediately before the war ; they
appear more criminal because they were more moral. Among
the Russian revolutionaries there had been growing perplexity
and disillusionment ever since 1906, when it was discovered
that the people’s leader, Father Gapon, owing to the emollient
effects of a visit to Monte Carlo, had sold himself to the police
as a spy. In 1909 they received a further shock. It was proved
that Aseff, the head of the largest and most powerful terrorist
organisation in Russia, had from the very beginning of his
career been a police agent, and though he had successfully
arranged the assassination of Plehve, the Minister of the
Interior, and the Grand Duke Serge, he had committed the
first crime partly because he was a Jew and disliked Plehve’s
anti-Semitism and partly because he wanted to strengthen his
position in revolutionary circles in order to get a higher salary
from the police, and he had committed the second to oblige
persons in court circles who had wanted to get rid of the Grand
Duke. This made all the sincere revolutionaries realise that their
ranks were riddled with treachery, and that if they risked their
lives it was probably to save the bacon of a police spy or further
palace intrigue. For this reason terrorism was practically ex-
tinct in Russia for some years before the war.

But the Southern Slavs were not traitors. It is true that
there existed numbers, indeed vast numbers, of Croats and
Serbs and Czechs who attempted to raise funds by selling to
the Austro-Hungarian Empire forged evidence that their
respective political parties were conspiring with the Serbian
Government. But their proceedings were always conducted
with the utmost publicity, and their forgeries were so clumsy
as to be recognised as such by the most prejudiced court ; they
presented telegrams, which were supposed to have been delivered,
on reception forms instead of transmission forms, and they put
forward photographs of patriotic societies’ minutes which bore
evidence that the original documents must have been over
three-foot-three by thirteen inches : a nice size for reproduction
but not for a society’s minutes. Neither the officials of the
Empire nor the Slav nationalists ever took any serious measures
against these disturbers of the peace, and they seem to have
had such a privileged position of misdoing as is given in some

364 BLACK LAMB AND GREY FALCON

villages to a pilferer, so long as he is sufficiently blatant and
modest in his exploits, so that he can be frustrated by reasonable
care, and the community loses not too much when he scores a
success.

But the real traitor and agent provocateur, who joined in
revolutionary activities for the purpose of betraying his comrades
to authority, was rare indeed among the South Slavs, and there-
fore terrorist organisations could function in confidence. They
honeycombed the universities and the schools to an extent
which seems surprising, till one remembers that owing to
poverty of the inhabitants and the defective system of education
imposed by the Austrian Empire, the age of the pupils at each
stage was two or three years above that which would have been
customary in a Western community.

The terrorism of these young men was given a new inspira-
tion in 1912 and 1913 by the Balkan wars in which Serbia beat
Turkey and Bulgaria. They saw themselves cutting loose from
the decaying corpse of an empire and uniting with a young and
triumphant democratic state; and by the multiplication of
society upon society and patriotic journal upon patriotic journal
they cultivated the idea of freeing themselves by acts of violence
directed against their rulers. This, however, did not alter that
horrible dispensation by which it is provided that those who most
thirstily desire to go on the stage shall be those who have the least
talent for acting. The Croats and Serbs are magnificent soldiers ;
they shoot well and they have hearts like lions. But they are de-
plorable terrorists. Much more individualist than the Russians,
the idea of a secret society was more of a toy to them than a
binding force. They were apt to go on long journeys to meet
fellow-conspirators for the purpose of discussing an outrage, and
on the way home to become interested in some other aspect of the
revolutionary movement, such as Tolstoyan pacifism, and leave
their bombs in the train. When they maintained their purpose,
they frequently lost not their courage but their heads at the
crucial moment, perhaps because the most convenient place for
such attentats, 'to use the Continental word for a crime directed
against the representative of a government, was among crowds
in a town, and the young Slav was not used to crowds. He
felt, as W. H. Davies put it of himself in urban conditions, " like
a horse near fire ”. Such considerations do not operate now.
The Great War hardened the nerves of a generation in the dealing

BOSNIA

36s

out of death, and it trained the following generation with its
experience plus the aid of all the money and help certain foreign
nations could give them. The Croats and Macedonians trained
in Italy and Hungary who killed King Alexander of Yugoslavia
represented the highest point of expertise in terrorism that man
has yet attained.

But in the days before the war the South Slavs were touching
and ardent amateurs. Typical of them was young Zheraitch,
a handsome Serb boy from a Herzegovinian village, who decided
to kill the Emperor Franz Josef when he visited Bosnia and
Herzegovina in 1910. With that end in mind he followed the
old man from Sarajevo to Mostar, and from Mostar to Ilidzhe,
revolver in hand, but never fired a shot. Then he decided to
kill the Governor of Bosnia, General Vareshanin, who was
specially abhorrent to the Slavs because he was a renegade
Croat. He waited on a bridge for the General as he drove to
open the Diet of Sarajevo. The boy fired five bullets at him,
which all went wide. He kept the sixth to fire at his own
forehead. It is said that Geno-al Vareshanin got out of his
car and walked over to his body and savagely kicked it, a
gesture which was bitterly remembered among all young South
Slavs. This poor boy was t)rpical of many of his fellows in
his failure. In June 1912 another Bosnian tried to kill the
Ban of Croatia in the streets of Zagreb, and killed two other
people, but not him. In August 1913 a young Croat tried to
kill the new Ban of Croatia, but only wounded him. In March
1914 another young Croat was caught in the Opera House at
Zagreb just as he was about to shoot the Ban and the Archduke
Leopold Salvator. And so on, and so on. The Balkan wars
altered this state of affairs to some extent. A g^at many young
Bosnians and Herzegovinians either swam across the river Drina
into Serbia, or slipped past the frontier guards on the Montenegrin
borders by night, in order to join irregular volunteer bands
which served as outfmsts for the Serbian Army as it invaded
Macedonia. All these young men acquired skill and hardihood
in the use of weapons. But those who stayed at home were
incurably inefficient as assassins.

Princip was not among the young Bosnians who had gone
to the Balkan wars. He had soon become weary of the school
life of Sarajevo, which was reduced to chaos by the general
political discontent of the pupils and their particular dis-

366 BLACK LAMB AND GREY FALCON

contents with the tehdencious curriculum of the Austro-
Hungarian education authorities. He took to shutting himself
up in his poor room and read enormously of philosophy and
politics, undermining his health and nerves by the severity of
these undirected studies. Always, of course, he was short of
money and ate but little. Finally he felt he had better emigrate
to Serbia and start studies at a secondary school at Belgrade,
and he took that step in May 1912, when he was barely seventeen.
One of his brothers gave him some money, and he had saved
much of what he had earned by teaching some little boys ;
but it must have been a starveling journey. In Belgrade he was
extremely happy in his studies, and might have become a
contented scholar had not the Balkan War broken out. He
immediately volunteered, and was sent down to a training
centre in the South of Serbia, and would have made a first-rate
soldier if gallantly had been all that was needed. But his
deprived body broke down, and he was discharged from the
Army.

Princip's humiliation was increased to a painful degree, it is
said, because another soldier with whom he was on bad terms
grinned when he saw him walking off with his discharge and
said, “ Siar/ ", throw-out, bad stuff. Though he went back
to Belgrade and studied hard and with great success, he was
extremely distressed at his failure to render service to the
Slav cause and prove his worth as a hero. It happened that in
Serbia he had become a close friend of a young printer from
Sarajevo called Chabrinovitch, a boy of his own age, who had
been banished from Bosnia for five years for the offence of
preaching anarchism. Much has been written about this youth
which is not too enthusiastic, though it might be described as
querulous rather than unfavourable. His companions found
something disquieting and annoying about his high spirits and
his garrulity, but it must be remembered that those who are
very remarkable people, particularly when they are young,
often repel more ordinary people by both their laughter and
their grief, which seem excessive by the common measure. It
is possible that what was odd about Chabrinovitch was simply
incipient greatness. But he was also labouring under the
handicap of an extremely hostile relationship to his father.
In any case he certainly was acceptable as a friend by Princip,
and this speaks well for his brains.

BOSNIA

367

They had a number of Sarajevan friends in common, whom
they had met at school or in the cafds. Among these was a
young schoolmaster called Danilo Hitch, a neurotic and irascible
and extremely unpopular ascetic. He is said to have served
in the Serbian Army during the Balkan War, but only as an
orderly. From the beginning of 1914 he was engaged in an
attempt to form a terrorist organisation for the purpose of
committing a desperate deed, though nobody, least of all him-
self, seemed to know exactly what. Among his disciples was
a young man called Pushara, who one day cut out of the news-
paper a paragraph announcing the intended visit of Franz
Ferdinand to Bosnia, and posted it from Sarajevo to Chabrino-
vitch in Belgrade. It is said by some that he meant merely
to intimate that there would be trouble, not that trouble should
be made. It is also to be noted that one of his family was said
to be an Austrian police spy. If he or somebody connected
with him had been acting as an agettt provocateur they could
not have hoped for better success. Chabrinovitch showed the
paragraph to Princip, and they decided to return to Sarajevo
and kill Franz Ferdinand.

But they needed help. Most of all they needed weapons.
First they thought of applying to the Narodna Obrana, the
Society of National Defence, for bombs, but their own good
sense told them that was impossible. The Narodna Obrana
was a respectable society acting openly under Government pro-
tection, and even these children, confused by misgovernment
to complete callousness, saw that it would have been asking too
much to expect it to commit itself to helping in the assassination
of a foreign royalty. Moreover they both had had experience
of the personalities directing the Narodna Obrana and they knew
they were old-fashioned, pious, conservative Serbs of the medieval
Serbian pattern, who were more than a little shocked by these
Bosnian children who sat up till all hours in caf6s and dabbled
in free thought. When Chabrinovitch had gone to the society
to ask a favour, an old Serbian captain had been gravely
shocked by finding the lad in possession of Maupassant’s Bel
Ami and had confiscated it.

It is unfortunate that at this point they met a Bosnian
refugee called Tsiganovitch who had heard rumours of their
intention and who offered to put them in the way of getting
some bombs. He was a member of the secret society known as

368 BLACK LAMB AND GREY FALCON

the " Black Hand ”, or was associated with it. This society
had already played a sinister part in the history of Serbia. It
was the lineal descendant of the group of officers who had killed
King Milan and Queen Draga and thus exchanged the Obreno-
vitch dynasty for the Karageorgevitch. The Karageorges,
who had played no part in this conspiracy, and had had to
accept its results passively, had never resigned themselves to
the existence of the group, and were continually at odds with
them. The “ Black Hand ” was therefore definitely anti-
Karageorgevitch and aimed at war with Austria and the
establishment of a federated republic of Balkan Slavs. Their
leader was a man of undoubted talent but far too picturesque
character called Dragutin Dimitrieyevitch, known as “ Apis ”,
who had been for some time the head of the Intelligence Bureau
of the Serbian General Staff. He had heard of Hitch and his
group through a Bosnian revolutionary living in Lausanne,
Gachinovitch, a boy of twenty-two who had an extraordinary
power over all his generation among the South Slavs, particularly
among the Bosnians ; his posthumous works were edited by
Trotsky. It was by his direction that Chabrinovitch and Princip
had been approached by Tsiganovitch, and were later taken in
hand, together with another Bosnian boy of nineteen called
Grabezh who had just joined them, by an officer called Tanko-
sitch, who had been concerned in the murder of King Milan
and Queen Draga.

Tankositch took the boys into some woods and saw how they
shot — which was badly, though Princip was better than the
others. Finally he fitted them out with bombs, pistols, and some
prussic acid to take when their attempts had been made, so that
they might be sure not to break down and blab in the presence
of the police. Then he sent them off to Sarajevo by what was
known as the underground route, a route by which persons who
might have found difficulty in crossing the frontiers, whether
for reasons of politics or contraband, were helped by friendly
pro-Slavs. The boys were smuggled through Bosnia by two
guards who were under orders from the “ Black Hand ”, and
with the help of a number of Balkan peasants and tradesmen,
who one and all were exceedingly discomfited but dared not
refuse assistance to members of a revolutionary body, they got
their munitions into Sarajevo.

This journey was completed only by a miracle, such was

BOSNIA

3<59

the inefificiency of the conspirators. Chabrinovitch talked too
much. Several times the people on whose good-will they were
dependent took fright and were in two minds to denounce the
matter to the police, and take the risk of revolutionary vengeance
rather than be hanged for complicity, as indeed some of them
were. Hitch was even less competent. He had arranged to
fetch the bombs at a certain railway junction, but he fell into a
panic and did not keep the appointment. For hours the sugar-
box containing the weapons lay in the public waiting-room
covered with a coat. The station cat had a comfortable sleep
on it. Unfortunately Hitch recovered his nerve and brought
the bombs to his home, where he kept them under the sofa in
his bedroom. He had swelled the ranks of those who were to
use these arms by some most unsuitable additions. He had
enrolled a Moslem called Mehmedbashitch, a peculiar char-
acter who had already shown a divided mind towards terrorism.
In January 1913 he had gone to Toulouse with a Moslem friend
and had visited the wonderful Gachinovitch, the friend of
Trotsky. He had received from the leader weapons and poison
for the purpose of attempting the life of General Potiorek, the
military governor of Bosnia, but on the way he and his friend
had thought better of it and dropped them out of the carriage
window. Hitch had also enrolled two schoolboys called Chu-
brilovitch and Popovitch, and gave them revolvers. Neither had
ever fired a shot in his life. The few days before the visit of the
Archduke Hitch spent in alternately exhorting this ill-assorted
group to show their patriotism by association and imploring
them to forget it and disperse. He was himself at one point so
overcome by terror that he got into the train and travelled all the
way to the town of Brod, a hundred miles away. But he came
back, though to the very end he seems at times to have urged
Princip, who was living with him, to abandon the attentat, and
to have expressed grave distrust of Chabrinovitch on the ground
that his temperament was not suited to terrorism. It might have
been supposed that Franz Ferdinand would never be more safe
in his life than he would be on St. Vitus’ Day at Sarajevo.

That very nearly came to be true. On the great day Hitch
made up his mind that the assassination should take place
after all, and he gave orders for the disposition of the con-
spirators in the street. They were so naive that it does not
seem to have struck them as odd that he himself proposed to

370 BLACK LAMB AND GREY FALCON

take no part in the attentat. They were told to take up their
stations at various points on the embankment : first Mehmed-
bashitch, then Chabrinovitch, then Chubrilovitch, then Popo-
vitch, and after that Princip, at the head of the bridge that now
bears his name, with Grabezh lacing him across the road. What
happened might easily have been foretold. Mehmedbashitch
never threw his bomb. Instead he watched the car go by
and then ran to the railway station and jumped into a train
that was leaving for Montenegro ; there he sought the protec-
tion of one of the tribes which constituted that nation, with
whom his family had friendly connections, and the tribesmen
kept him hidden in their mountain homes. Later he made his
way to France, and that was not to be the end of his adventures.
He was to be known to Balkan history as a figure hardly less
enigmatic than the Man in the Iron Mask. The schoolboy
Chubrilovitch had been told that if Mehmedbashitch threw his
bomb he was to finish off the work with his revolver, but if
Mehmedbashitch failed he was to throw his own bomb. He
did nothing. Neither did the other schoolboy, Popovitch. It
was impossible for him to use either his bomb or his revolver,
for in his excitement he had taken his stand beside a policeman.
Chabrinovitch threw his bomb, but high and wide. He then
swallowed his dose of prussic acid and jumped off the parapet
of the embankment. There, as the prussic acid had no effect
on him, he suffered arrest by the police. Princip heard the noise
of Chabrinovitch’s bomb and thought the work was done, so
stood still. When the car went by and he saw that the royal
pcirty was still alive, he was dazed with astonishment and walked
away to a cafi, where he sat down and had a cup of coffee and
pulled himself together. Grabezh was also deceived by the
explosion and let his opportunity go by. Franz Ferdinand
would have gone from Sarajevo untouched had it not been for
the actions of his staff, who by blunder after blunder contrived
that his car should slow down and that he should be presented
as a stationary target in front of Princip, the one conspirator
of real and mature deliberation, who had finished his cup of
coffee and was walking back through the streets, aghast at the
failure of himself and his friends, which would expose the
country to terrible punishment without having inflicted any loss
on authority. At last the bullets had been coaxed out of the
reluctant revolver to the bodies of the eager victims.

BOSNIA

371

Saregevo VI

" Do you see,” said Constantine, “ the last folly of these
idiots ? ” There is a raw edge to the ends of the bridge, an
unhemmed look to the masonry on both sides of the road.
“ They put up a statue of the Archduke Franz Ferdinand and
his wife, not in Vienna, where there was a good deal of expiation
to be done to those two, but here, where the most pitiful amongst
us could not pity them. As soon as we took the town over
after the liberation they were carted away." They may still
be standing in some backyard, intact or cut into queer sculptural
joints, cast down among ironically long grass. There was
never more convincing proof that we do not make our own
destinies, that they are not merely the pattern traced by our
characteristics on time as we rush through it, than the way
that the destinies of Franz Ferdinand and Sophie Chotek
continued to operate after their death. In their lives they had
passed from situation to situation which invited ceremonial
grandeur and had been insanely deprived of it in a gross
ceremonial setting, and it was so when they were in their coffins.
They were sent to Vienna, to what might have been hoped was
the pure cold cancellation of the tomb. They were, however,
immediately caught up and whirled about in a stately and
complicated vortex of contumely and hatred that astonished
the whole world, even their world, accustomed as it was to
hideousness.

The Emperor Franz Josef cannot be blamed for the insolence
which was wreaked on the coffins on their arrival in Vienna. A
man of eighty-seven whose wife had been assassinated, whose
son was either murdered or was a murderer and suicide, cannot
be imagined to be other than shattered when he hears of the
assassination of his heir and nephew, who was also his enemy,
and his wife, who was a shame to his family The occasion
drew from Franz Josef a superb blasphemy ; when he heard
the news the thought of the morganatic marriage came first to
his mind, and he said that God had corrected a wrong which
he had been powerless to alter. But the guilt of the funeral
arrangements at Vienna must rest on Prince Montenuovo, the
Emperor’s Chamberlain, who had tormented Franz Ferdinand
and Sophie Chotek in his life by the use of etiquette, and found

372 BLACK LAMB AMD GREY FALCON

that by the same weapon he could pursue them after their death.

Nothing but actual insanity can explain Prince Montenuovo’s
perversion of the funeral arrangements. He was not only a
cultured man, he had shown himself at times humane and
courageous. In March 1913 he had acted for Franz Josef in
his resistance to Conrad’s attempt to drag Austria into an
unprovoked war with Serbia and Montenegro, and he had
performed his duties with great tact and sense and principle.
It would have been supposed that such a man, on finding himself
charged with the duty of consigning to the grave the bodies of a
husband and wife with whom he had been on contentious terms
for many years, would feel compelled to a special decorum.
Instead he could find no impropriety too wild for any part of
the ceremony.

He arranged that the train which brought the bodies home
should be delayed so that it arrived at night. It came in horribly
spattered by the blood of a railwayman who had been ..killed
at a level crossing. Montenuovo had two initial reverses. He
prescribed that the new heir, the Archduke Charles, should
not meet the train, but the young man insisted on doing so.
He tried also to prevent Sophie Chotek’s coffin from lying
beside her husband’s in the Royal Chapel during the funeral
mass, but to that Franz Josef would not consent. But he had
several successes. Sophie’s coffin was placed on a lower level
to signify her lower rank. The full insignia of the Archduke
lay on his coffin, on hers wa-e placed the white gloves and
black fan of the former lady-in-waiting. No wreath was sent
by any member of the imperial family except Stephanie, the
widow of the Crown Prince Rudolf, who had long been on
atrocious terms with her relatives. The only flowers were a
cross of white roses sent by the dead couple’s two children
and some wreaths sent by foreign sovereigns. The Emperor
Franz Josef attended the service, but immediately afterwards
the chapel was closed, in order that the public should have no
opportunity to pay their respects to the dead.

Montenuovo attempted to separate the two in their graves.
He proposed that Franz Ferdinand should be laid in the Haps-
burg tomb in the Capucine Church, while his wife’s body was
sent to the chapel in their castle at Arstetten on the Danube.
But to guard against this Franz Ferdinand had left directions
that he too was to be buried at Arstetten. Montenuovo bowed

BOSNIA

373

to this decision, but announced that his responsibility would end
when he had left the coffins at the West Terminus station. The
municipal undertaker had to make all arrangements for putting
them on the train for Pochlarn, which was the station for Arstetten,
and getting them across the Danube to the castle. But Monte-
nuovo provided that their task was made difficult by holding
back the procession from the chapel till late at night. As a
protest a hundred members of the highest Hungarian and
Austrian nobility appeared in the costumes that would have
been the proper wear at an imperial funeral, thrust themselves
into the procession, and walked on foot to the station.

The coffins and the mourners travelled on a train that de-
livered them at Pochlarn at one o’clock in the morning. They
found that the station had not been prepared for the occasion,
there were no crape hangings or red carpets. This was extremely
shocking to a people obsessed with etiquette and pomp. But
they soon had more solid reasons for resentment. The moment
when the coffins were laid on the platform was the signal for a
blinding and deafening and drenching thunderstorm. The
disadvantages of a nocturnal funeral became apparent. Nobody
in charge of the proceedings knew the village, so the mourners
could not find their way to shelter and had to pack into the little
station, impeding the actual business of the funeral. It had been
proposed to take the coffins to a neighbouring church for a
further part of the religious services, but the hearses could not be
loaded in the heavy rain, and indeed the mourners would not have
known where to follow them in the darkness. So the bewildered
priests consecrated the coffins in the crowded little waiting-room
among the time-tables and advertisements of seaside resorts.
At last the rain stopped, and a start was made for the castle.
But there was still much thunder and lightning, and the sixteen
horses that drew the hearses were constantly getting out of
control. It was dawn when the cavalcade was brought safely to a
quay on the Danube, and in the quietness the horses were coaxed
on to the ferry-boat by attendants who had water running down
round their feet in streams from their sodden clothing. The
mourners, left on the bank to wait their turn, watched the boat
with thankfulness. But when it was in the middle of the stream
there was a last flash of lightning, a last drum-roll of thunder.
The left pole-horse in front of the Archduke's hearse reared,
and the back wheels slipped over the edge of the ferry-boat.

374 BLACK LAMB AND- GREY FALCON

Till it reached the other side it was a shambles of terrified horses,
of men who could hardly muster the strength to cling to the
harness, and cried out in fatigue and horror as they struggled, of
coffins slipping to the water's edge.

It is strange that it was this scene which made it quite certain
that the Sarajevo attentat should be followed by a European war.
The funeral was witnessed by a great many soldiers and officials
and men of influence, and their reaction was excited and not
logical. If Franz Ferdinand had been quietly laid to rest accord-
ing to the custom of his people, many Austrians would have felt
sober pity for him for a day, and then remembered his many
faults. They would surely have reflected that he had brought
his doom on himself by the tactlessness and aggressiveness of his
visit to the Serbian frontier at the time of a Serbian festival ;
and they might also have reflected that those qualities were
characteristic not only of him but of his family. The proper sequel
to the Walpurgisnacht obsequies of Franz Ferdinand would
have been the dismissal of Prince Montenuovo, the drastic
revision of the Austrian constitution and reduction of the in-
fluence wielded by the Hapsburgs and their court, and an
attempt at the moral rehabilitation of Vienna. But to take any
of these steps Austria would have had to look in the mirror.
She preferred instead to whip herself into a fury of loyalty to
Franz Ferdinand’s memory. It was only remembered that he
was the enemy of Franz Josef, who had now shown himself
sacrilegious to a corpse who, being a Hapsburg, must have been
as sacred as an emperor who was sacred because he was a Haps-
burg. It was felt that if Franz Ferdinand had been at odds
with this old man and his court he had probably been right.
Enthusiasm flamed up for the men who had been chosen by
Franz Ferdinand, for Conrad von Hdtzendorf and Berchthold,
and for the policy of imperialist aggression that they had jointly
engendered. Again the corpse was outraged ; he could not
speak from the grave to say that he had cancelled those prefer-
ences, to protest when these men he had repudiated put for-
ward the policy he had abandoned and pressed it on the plea of
avenging his death. The whole of Vienna demanded that the
pacifism of Franz Josef should be flouted as an old man’s folly
and that Austria should declare war upon Serbia.

The excuse for this declaration of war was the allegation that
the conspirators had been suborned to kill Franz Ferdinand by

BOSNIA

375

the Serbian Government. During the last twenty years, in the
mood of lazy and cynical self-oiticism which has afflicted the
powers thiit were apparently victorious in 1918, it has been often
pretended that there were grounds for that allegation. It has
been definitely stated in many articles and books that the Serbian
Government was aware of the murderous intentions of Princip,
Chabrinovitch and Grabezh, and itself supplied them with
bombs and revolvers and sent them back to Bosnia. Some-
times it is suggested that the Russian Government joined with
the Serbian Government to commit this crime.

Not one scrap of evidence exists in support of these allega-
tions.

One of the most celebrated contemporary writers on European
affairs sets down in black and white the complicity of the Serbian
and Russian Governments. I have asked him for his authority.
He has none. A famous modern English historian, not pro-
Serb, tells me that ever since the war he has been looking for
some proof of the guilt of Serbia, and has never found it, or any
indication that it is to be found.

It is clear, and nothing could be clearer, that certain Serbian
individuals supplied the conspirators with encouragement and
arms. But this does not mean that the Serbian Government was
responsible. If certain Irishmen, quite unconnected with Mr.
De Valera, should supply Irish Americans with bombs for the
purpose of killing President Roosevelt, and he died, the United
States would not therefore declare war on Eire. A connection
between the Irishmen and their Government would have to
be established before a eastfs belli would be recognised. But
no link whatsoever has been discovered between the Serbian
Government and Tsiganovitch and Tankositch, the obscure
individuals who had given Princip and Chabrinovitch and
Grabezh their bombs. They were, indeed, members of the “ Black
Hand ", the secret society which was savagely hostile both to the
Karageorge dynasty and the political party then in power. That
this hostility was not a fiction is shown by the precautions taken
against discovery by the Serbian sentries who helped the con-
spirators over the frontier.

There are only two reasons which would give ground for
suspicion of the Serbian Government. The first is the marks on
the bombs, which showed definitely that they had been issued
by the Serbian State Arsenal at Kraguyevats. That looks

376 BLACK LAMB AND GREY FALCON

damning, but means nothing. Bombs were distributed in large
numbers both to the comitadji and regular troops during the
Balkan War, and many soldiers put them by as likely to come
in handy in the rough-and-tumble of civil life. A search through
the outhouses of many a Serbian farm would disclose a store of
them. Tankositch would have had no difficulty in acquiring as
many as he liked, without any need for application to the authori-
ties. The other suspicious circumstance is the refusal of several
Serbian officials to disclaim responsibility for the crime, and the
assumption by others of a certain foreknowledge of the crime
which was first cousin to actual responsibility for it. This can
be discounted in view of the peculiar atmosphere of Balkan
politics. A century ago no political leader could come forward
among the Slavs unless he had distinguished himself in guerilla
warfare against the Turks, warfare which often involved what
would be hard to tell from assassination. For this reason politi-
cians of peasant origin, bred in the full Balkan tradition, such as
the Serbian Prime Minister, Mr. Pashitch, could not feel the same
embarrassment at being suspected of complicity in the murder
of a national enemy that would have been felt by his English
contemporaries, say Mr. Balfour or Mr. Asquith. After all, an
Irish politician would not find a very pressing need to exculpate
himself from a charge of having been concerned in the murder
of Sir Henry Wilson, so far as the good-will of his constituents
was concerned. But no hint of any actual meeting or corre-
spondence by which Mr. Pashitch established any contact,
however remote, with the conspirators has ever been given ;
and as any such contact would have involved a reconciliation
with those who before and after were his enemies, there must
have been go-betweens, but these, in spite of the loquacity of the
race, have never declared themselves. There was a Mr. Liuba
Yovanovitch, Minister of Education under Mr. Pashitch, who
could not stop writing articles in which he boasted that he and
his friends in Belgrade had known for weeks ahead that the
conspiracy was hatching in Sarajevo. But unkind researchers
have discovered that seven years before he put in exactly the
same claim concerning the murder of King Alexander and
Queen Draga, and that members of that conspiracy had indig-
nantly brought forward proof that they had nothing to do with
him. Mr. Yovanovitch, in fact, was the Balkan equivalent of the
sort of Englishman who wears an Old Etonian tie without cause.

BOSNIA

377

On the other hand there were overwhelming reasons why the
Serbian Government should not have supported this or any
other conspiracy. It cannot have wanted war at that particular
moment. The Karageorges must have been especially anxious
to avoid it. King Peter had just been obliged by chronic ill-health
to appoint his son Alexander as his regent and it had not
escaped the attention of the Republican Party that the King had
had to pass over his eldest son, George, because he was hope-
lessly insane. Mr. Pashitch and his Government can hardly
have been more anxious for a war, as their machine was tem-
porarily disorganised by preparations for a general election.
Both alike, the Royal Family and the Ministers, held disquieting
knowledge about the Serbian military situation. Their country
had emerged from the two Balkan wars victorious but exhausted,
without money, transport or munitions, and with a peasant
army that was thoroughly sick of fighting. They can have
known no facts to offset those, for none existed. Theoretically
they could only rely on the support of France and Russia, and
possibly Great Britain, but obviously geography would forbid
any of these powers giving her practical aid in the case of an
Austrian invasion.

In fact, the Karageorges and the Government knew per-
fectly well that, if there should be war, they must look forward
to an immediate defeat of the most painful sort, for which they
could only receive compensation should their allies, whoever they
might be, at some uncertain time win a definite victory. But if
there should be peace, then the Karageorges and the Government
could consolidate the victories they had won in the Balkan
wars, develop their conquered territory, and organise their
neglected resources. Admittedly Serbia aimed at the ultimate
absorption of Bosnia and Herzegovina, Montenegro and the
South Slav provinces of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. But this
was not the suitable moment. If she attained her aims by this
method she would have to pay too heavy a price, as, in fact, she
did. No country would choose to realise any ideal at the cost of
the destruction of one-third of her population. That she did not
so choose is shown by much negative evidence. At the time the
murder was committed she had just let her reservists return
home after their annual training, her Commander-in- Chief was
taking a cure at an Austrian spa, and none of the Austrian
Slavs who had fought in the Balkan War and returned home

378 BLACK LAMB AND GREY FALCON

were warned to come across the frontier. But the positive
evidence is even stronger. When Austria sent her ultimatum to
Serbia, which curtly demanded not only the punishment of the
Serbians who were connected with the Sarajevo attentat, but
the installation of Austrian and Hungarian officers in Serbia for
the purpose of suppressing Pan-Slavism, Mr. Pashitch bowed to
all the demands save for a few gross details, and begged that the
exceptions he had made should not be treated as refusals but
should be referred for arbitration to The Hague Tribunal. There
was not one trace of bellicosity in the attitude of Serbia at this
point. If she had promoted the Sarajevo attentat in order to
make war possible, she was very near to throwing her advantage
away.

The innocence of the Serbian Government must be admitted
by all but the most prejudiced. But guilt lies very heavy on the
" Black Hand ”. There is, however, yet another twist in the
story here. It seems fairly certain that that guilt was not sus-
tained of full intent. We may doubt that when " Apis ” sent
these young men to Bosnia he believed for one moment that they
would succeed in their plan of killing Franz Ferdinand. He was
just as well aware as the authorities of the military and economic
difficulties of his country, and probably wanted war as little as
they did. But even if he had been of another mind he would
hardly have chosen such agents. The conspirators, when they
first attracted his attention, numbered only two weakly boys
of nineteen, Princip and Chabrinovitch. He had learned that
their only revolutionary connections in Sarajevo were through
Hitch ; and as this information came from Gachinovitch, the
exile who knew everything about the unrest in Bosnia, he must
have learned at the same time how inexperienced in terrorism
Hitch was. " Apis " must also have known from his officers
that Princip was only a fair shot, and that Chabrinovitch and
the third boy who joined them later, Grabezh, could not hit a
wall. He must have realised that in such inexpert hands the
revolvers would be nearly useless, and the bombs would be no
better, for they were not the sort used by the Russian terrorists,
which exploded at contact, but the kind used in trench warfare,
which had to be hit against a hard object before they were thrown,
and then took some seconds to go off. They were extremely
difficult to throw in a crowd ; any soldier could have guessed
that Chabrinovitch would neva- be able to aim one straight.

BOSNIA

379

Yet " Apis ’* could have got any munitions that he wanted
by taking a little trouble, and, what is more, he could have got
any number of patriotic Bosnians who had been through the
Balkan wars and could shoot and throw bombs with profes-
sional skill. I myself know a Herzegovinian, a remarkable shot
and a seasoned soldier, who placed himself at the disposition
of the " Black Hand ’’ to assassinate any oppressor of ^e Slav
people. " Dans ces jours-li,” he says, " nous dtions tous fous.”
His offer was never accepted. It is to be wondered whether
" Apis " was quite the character his contemporaries believed.
Much is made of his thirst for blood, and he was certainly in-
volved, though not in any major capacity, in the murder of
King Alexander and Queen Draga. But the rest of his reputa-
tion is based on his self-confessed participation in plots to
murder King Nicholas of Montenegro, King Constantine of
Greece, the last German Kaiser, and King Ferdinand of Bulgaria.
The first three of these monarchs, however, died in their beds,
and the last one is still with us. It is possible that “ Apis ”
was obsessed by a fantasy of bloodshed and treachery, which he
shrank from translating into fact, partly out of a poetic preference
for fantasy over fact, partly out of a very sensible regard for
his own skin.

There is, indeed, one circumstance which tells us that the
“ Black Hand ” took Princip and his friends very lightly indeed.
Over and over again we read in the records of these times about
boys who took out revolvers or bombs with the intention of
killing this or that instrument of Austrian tyranny, but lost
heart and returned home without incident. There must have
been many more such abortive attempts than are recorded.
The “ Black Hand ” was the natural body to which such boys
would turn with a request for arms ; it would be interesting to
know how often they had handed out munitions which had
never been used. Repetition had, it seems, bred carelessness
in classification. For when Princip and Chabrinovitch took
the prussic acid which Tsiganovitch and Tankositch had given
them, it had no effect on either. It is said vaguely that it
had '* gone bad ”, but prussic acid is not subject to any such
misfortune. In the only form which is easy to obtain it does
not even evaporate quickly. What Tsiganovitch and Tan-
kositch had given the boys was plain water, or something
equally innocuous. They would not have made this substitution

38o black lamb AND GREY FALCON

if they had believed in the effectiveness of the conspiracy. They
must have known that if the boys succeeded and were tortured
and talked they would have reason for the gravest fears;
which, indeed, were realised. “ Apis ” was executed by the
Serbian Government three years later, after a mysterious trial
which is one of the most baffling incidents in Balkan history ;
nothing is clear about it save that the real offence for which he
was punished was his connection with the Sarajevo attentat.
Tankositch and Tsiganovitch also paid a heavy price in their
obscurer way.

Only one person involved in this business did what he meant
to do : Princip believed he ought to kill Franz Ferdinand, and
he shot him dead. But everybody else acted contrary to his own
will. The dead pair, who had dreamed of empire stretching
from the Baltic to the Black Sea, surrendered the small primary
power to breathe. If the generals about them had had any hope
of procuring victory and the rule of the sword they were to fail
to the extraordinary degree of annihilating not only their own
army but their own nation. The conspirators wanted to throw
their bombs, and could not. Hitch, whose flesh quailed at the
conspirator’s lot, was compelled to it by the values of his society,
distracted as it was by oppression. In Vienna Montenuovo
raised a defence of criminal insolence round the sacred Haps-
burg stock, and uprooted it from Austrian soil, to lie on the
rubbish-heap of exile. There was an exquisite appropriateness
in this common fate which fell on all those connected with the
events of that St. Vitus’ Day ; for those who are victims of
what is known as St. Vitus’ disease suffer an uncontrollable
disposition to involuntary motions.

Sarajevo VII

“ You must come up to the Orthodox cemetery and see the
graves of these poor boys,” said Constantine. " It is very
touching, for a reason that will appear when you see it.” Two
days later we made this expedition, with the judge and the
banker to guide us. But Constantine could not keep back his
dramatic climax until we got there. He felt he had to tell us
when we had driven only half-way up the hillside. " What is
so terrible,” he said, " is that they are there in that grave, the

BOSNIA

381

poor little ones, Princip, Chabrinovitch, Grabezh and three
other little ones who were taken with them. They could not
be hanged, the law forbade it. Nobody could be hanged in the
Austrian Empire under twenty-one. Yet I tell you they are all
there, and they certainly did not have time to die of old age,
for they were all dead before the end of the war.”

This, indeed, is the worst part of the story. It explains why
it has been difficult to establish humane penal methods in
countries which formed part of the Austrian Empire, and why
minor officials in those succession states often take it for granted
that violence is a part of the technique of administration. The
sequel to the attentat shows how little Bosnians had to con-
gratulate themselves for exchanging Austrian domination for
Turkish.

When the Serbian prussic acid failed, both Princip and
Chabrinovitch made other attempts at suicide which were
frustrated. Princip put his revolver to his temple, and had it
snatched away by a busybody. Chabrinovitch jumped into the
river and was fished out by the police. He made at that point
a remark which has drawn on him much heavy-footed derision
from German writers owing to a misunderstanding over a Serb
word. A policeman who arrested him said in his evidence at the
trial, " I hit him with my fist, and I said, ‘ Why don’t you come
on ? You are a Serb, aren't you ? ’ " He said that Chabrino-
vitch answered him in a phrase that has been too literally trans-
lated, “ Yes, I am a Serbian hero ”. This has been taken by
foreign commentators as proof of Chabrinovitch’s exalted folly
and the inflamed character of Serbian nationalism. But the
word " Yunak ” has a primary meaning of hero and a secondary
meaning of militant nationalist. The words the policeman
intended to put into Chabrinovitch’s mouth were simply, " Yes,
I am a Serbian nationalist ”, so that he could say that he had
then asked, “ Where did you get your gun ? ” and that he had
been answered, “ From our society ”. Chabrinovitch gave a
convincing denial that the conversation, even in this form, ever
took place. Thus is the face of history thickly veiled.

The two youths, beaten to unconsciousness, were taken to
prison ; which on the morrow of St. Vitus' Day was as good a
place to be as any in Sarajevo. For there broke out an anti-
Slav riot, which in its first impulse destroyed the best hotel
in Sarajevo and the office of a Serb newspaper, and the next

38a BLACK LAMB AND GREY FALCON

day merged into an organised pogrom of the Serb inhabitants
of Sarajevo. There was, of course, some spontaneous feeling
against them. Many Moslems grieved over the loss of their
protector, and a number of devoutly Catholic Croats regretted
their co-religionist for his piety ; it is known that some of these,
notably a few Croat clerical students, joined in the rioting. But
General Potiorek had had to contrive the rest. The bulk of the
demonstrators consisted of very poor Catholics, Jews and Mos-
lems, many of whom had come to town to work in the new
factories and had fallen into a pitiful slough of misery. Those
unhappy wretches were told by police agents that if they wanted
to burn and loot authority would hold its hand, and, more than
that, that they had better burn and loot good and hard, lest a
misfortune should fall on the town.

This warning was more heavily impressed on the people by
the thousands of troops that had been brought into the town
now that Franz Ferdinand and Sophie Chotek were dead and
beyond need of protection. There were enough of them to line
three-deep the long route by which the coffins passed from the
Cathedral to the railway station. Many of them were Croat
and Austrian, and afterwards they walked about with fixed
bayonets, singing anti-Serb songs. They did not interfere with
the rioters. Rather were they apt to deal harshly with those
who were not taking a sufficiently active part in the riot. It
was doubtless easy to take the hint and enjoy the license.
Human nature is not very nice.

But the full blame for the riot cannot be laid on these helpless
victims of coercion. The leading Serb in Sarajevo owned a
house, a hotel, a cafd, warehouses and stables, in different parts
of the town. All were visited, and all were methodically sacked
from cellar to roof. Street fighters do not work with such
system. Then those who appeared with pickaxes and slowly
and conscientiously razed to the foundations houses belonging
to the Serbs were not stopped by the authorities. In this way
material damage was inflicted on the town to the amount of
two hundred thousand pounds. So little was the rioting spon-
taneous that many Croats and Jews and Moslems risked their
lives by giving shelter to Serbs ; but so many lives were lost
that the figures were suppressed.

Not a single rioter was jailed nor a single official, military
or civil, degraded for failure to keep order. It is not surprising

BOSNIA

383

that like riots broke out during the next few days' in every
provincial town and sizable village where the Croats and
Moslems outnumbered the Serbs. This is said to have been a
device of General Potiorek to placate the authorities and dissuade
them from punishing him for his failure to protect Franz
Ferdinand. But it is doubtftil if he had any reason to fear
punishment, for he was promoted immediately afterwards.
Meantime hundreds of schoolboys and students were thrown
into prison, and were joined by all eminent Serbs, whether
teachers or priests or members of religious or even temperance
societies. As soon as war broke out there were appalling
massacres ; in such a small place as Pali, the winter sports
village above Sarajevo, sixty men and women were killed.
■Wholesale arrests filled the fortresses of Hungary with prisoners,
of whom more than half were to die in their dungeons.

The Austrian excuse for this war was self-defence ; but
it is hard to extend it to cover the riots at Sarajevo. It is carry-
ing self-defence too far to use a pickaxe and demolish the house
of the man whom one regards, surely by that time only in theory,
as an aggressor. Moreover, already the arrested youths had
been interrogated and it must have been suspected by the
authorities that the conspiracy might consist of a few isolated
people of no importance. Before the provincial riots that
suspicion must have become a certainty. For the prisoners
had talked quite a lot. They, and those friends of theirs who
had been arrested later, had been put to torture. Princip was
tied to an oak beam so that he stood tiptoe on the ground.
Grabezh was made to kneel on a rolling barrel, so that he con-
tinually fell off in a stifling cloud of dust, and was put in a
strait-jacket that was pulled in again and again ; and shep-
herd dogs, of the sort that are often terribly strong and savage
in Bosnia and Serbia, were let loose in his cell when he was
faint with pain and lack of sleep. Chabrinovitch apparently
escaped such tortures, because the garrulity of which his friends
complained came in useful, and from the very beginning he told
the police a great deal ; and they did not find out till the end
of the trial that it was not true. He concocted a very clever
story .that the Freemasons had ordered the murder of Franz
Ferdinand because he was so militant a Catholic, which diverted
suspicion from Belgrade. But Hitch was also arrested, and the
threat of torture was enough to make him tell everything. Let

384 BLACK LAMB AND GREY FALCON

him who is without fear cast the first stone ; but it meant that all
the peasants and tradesmen who had reluctantly helped in the
journey from the frontier, all the schoolboys who had chattered
with him about revolt at the pastrycook’s, joined the conspirators
in jail. Some of them, however, would have been arrested in
any case, for the Austrian Army had by now crossed the Serbian
frontier and seized the customs records, which made them able
to trace the route.

The conspirators passed a time of waiting before the trial
which would have been unutterably terrible to Western prisoners,
but which these strange, passionate yet philosophical children
seem to have in a fashion enjoyed, though at one time hope
deferred must have made their hearts sicken. In their cells they
heard the guns of the Serbian Army as it crossed the Drina, and
they expected to be rescued. But the sound of the firing guns
grew fainter and died away, and later Serbian prisoners of war
were brought into the prison.

On the twelfth of October the trial began. It is typical of
the insanity of our world that, ten weeks before this, Austria had
declared war on Serbia because of her responsibility for the
attentat, although these were the first proceedings which made
it possible to judge whether that responsibility existed. The
trial was for long veiled from common knowledge. Only certain
highly official German and Austrian newspapers were allowed
to send correspondents. Chabrinovitch, in the course of one of
his very intelligent interventions in the trial, talked of the secret
sittings of the court, and when the president asked him what he
meant, he pointed out that no representatives of the opposition
press were present. To this the president made the reply, which
is curiously like what we have heard from the Nazis very often
since, " What 1 According to your ideas, is a court open only when
the representatives of the opposition are allowed to come in ? "
There were naturally no English or French correspondents at that
time ; and there were apparently no American journalists. None
could follow Serbo-Croat, so they took their material from their
German colleagues. The most dramatic event of our time was
thus completely hidden from us at the time when it most affected
us ; and it has only been gradually and partially revealed. The
official reports were sent to Vienna and there they disappeared.
Not till the early twenties was a carbon copy found in Sarajevo.
This can be read in a French translation ; care should be taken

BOSNIA

38s

in consulting a German version, for one at least abounds in
interpolations and perversions devised in the interest of uphold-
ing Chabrinovitch’s fabrications about Freemasonry. The only
account of it in English is contained in Mr. Stephen Graham’s
admirable novel St. Vitus' Day.

It is perhaps for this reason that there are many false ideas
abroad to-day concerning the conspiracy. It is imagined to
have been far more formidable than it was. People say, “ You
know Franz Ferdinand had no chance, there were seven men in
the street to shoot him if Princip failed." This is what the
Moslems in the Town Hall thought, but it is not true. Princip
was not the first but the last in the line of assassins, and all the
rest had proved themselves unfitted for their job. It is also held
that the conspirators were dangerous fanatics of maniacal or at
least degenerate type. But actually their behaviour in court
was not only completely sane but cheerful and dignified, and
their evidence and speeches showed both individual ability and
a very high level of culture. Even those who hate violence
and narrow passions must admit that the records of the trial
open a world which is not displeasing.

It is, of course, disordered. As a schoolboy goes into the
dock he is asked according to form whether he has any previous
convictions. Yes, he has served a fortnight in prison for having
struck a teacher in a political disturbance in a class-room. One
peasant, charged with helping the conspirators to dispose of the
bombs, wept perpetually. It was the fate of his simple law-
abiding sort to be ground between the upper and the nether mill-
stones of an oppressive government and revolutionary societies
so desperate that they dared to be almost as oppressive. When
they asked him why he had not denounced the party to the police
when he saw the bombs, he said, “ But with us one cannot do a
thing like that without the permission of the head of the family.”
He was sentenced to be hanged, and though his sentence was
reduced to twenty years’ imprisonment, he died in prison. Other
prisoners showed the essential unity of the Slav race by talking
like Dostoevsky characters, by falling out of a procession that
marched briskly to a temporal measure and settling down to
discuss spiritual matters, no more quickly than the slow pulse
of eternity. When the president of the court said to one of the
schoolboys, “ But you say you’re religious . . . that you’re a
member of the Orthodox Church. Don’t you realise that your

386 BLACK LAMB AND GREY FALCON

religion forbids the killing of a man ? Is your faith serious or
is it on the surface ? ” the boy thoughtfully answered, " Yes, it is
on the surface”. Another expounded the mysticism of Pan-
Slavism, claiming that his nationalism was part of his religion,
and his religion was part of his nationalism. How poorly Austria
was qualified to bring order into these gifted people’s lives — and
there was no reason for her presence if she could not — is shown
by the shocking muddle of the court procedure. Dates were
hardly ever mentioned and topics were brought up as they came
into the heads of the lawyers rather than according to any logical
programme.

Nobody made any recriminations against Hitch, though it
was apparent he had behaved far from well. Some of the
prisoners fought for their lives, but with a certain dignity, and
on the whole without sacrifice of their convictions. It is very
clear, however, that Princip was in a class apart. Throughout
the trial he was always selfless and tranquil, alert to defend and
define his ideas but indifferent to personal attacks. He never
made a remark throughput the trial that was not sensible and
broad-minded. It is interesting to note that he declared he' had
committed his crime as a peasant who resented the poverty the
Austrians had brought on his kind.

Chabrinovitch, however, was a very good second, in spite of
the unfavourable impression he often made. That impression
one can quite understand after one has read the records. At
one point he held up the proceedings to make a clever and
obscure joke that did not quite come oflF, of the sort that infuri-
ates stupid people ; but it is also clear that he was extremely
able. He kept his Freemasonry myth going with remarkable
skill ; and Princip carried on a debate which the Left Wing
youth of England and France came to only much later.
Chabrinovitch had in the past been a pacifist. Indeed, though
a passionate Pan-Serb, he had dissuaded many of his fellow-
students from enlisting in Serbia's ranks during the Balkan
wars. He was still so much of a pacifist that he was not sure
whether his act in attempting the life of Franz Ferdinand had
been morally defensible. It was, if it were ever right to use
force ; but of that he was never fully persuaded. In his
speech to the court before it pronounced judgment this point of
view was very apparent. He did not ask for mercy, and he quite
rightly laid the blame for his crime on the poisoned atmosphere

BOSNIA 3S7

of the oppressed provinces, where every honest man was turned
into a rebel, and assassination became a display of virtue. But
Princip had always been of the opinion that this was not the
time for Bosnians to delve into first principles. He had never
been a pacifist, and as a boy had argued coldly and destructively
with the Tolstoyan group in Sarajevo. He simply said ; “ Any-
one who says that the inspiration for this attentat came from
outside our groiq) is playing with the truth. We originated the
idea, and we carried it out. We loved the people. 1 have nothing
to say in my defence.”

The trial went as might have been expected. Consideration
of the speeches of the counsel for the defence show that it was
very nearly as difficult in Austria for a prisoner charged by
the government to find a lawyer to put his case as it is in Nazi
Germany. The Croat lawyer who was defending one prisoner
showed the utmost reluctance to plead his cause at all. He
began his speech by saying, “ Illustrious tribunal, after all we
have heard, it is peculiarly painful for me, as a Croat, to conduct
the defence of a Serb.” But there was one counsel. Dr. Rudolf
Zistler, who bore himself as a hero. With an intrepidity that
was doubly admirable considering it was war-time, he pointed
out that the continual succession of trials for high treason in
the Slav provinces could only be explained by misgovernment ;
and he raised a vital point, so vital that it is curious he was
allowed to finish his speech, by claiming that it was absurd to
charge the prisoners with conspiracy to detach Bosnia and
Herzegovina from the Austrian Empire, because the legal basis
of the annexation of these provinces was unsatisfactory, and
in any case the annexation had never been properly ratified.
Apparently the first proposition can be disputed, but the second
IS sound enough. Neither the Austrian nor Hungarian Parlia-
ment ever voted on the necessary Act of Annexation. It was
only a technicality, just another piece of ScMamperei ; but it
adds yet one more fantastic touch to the event that Princip had
had a legal right to be where he was in Sarajevo, and that
Franz Ferdinand had had none.

Nothing, of course, was of any avail. Hitch, together with
a schoolmaster, a retired bioscope exhibitor, the peasant who
wept, and one more stoical, who had all played a part in
harbouring and transporting the munitions, was sentenced to
the gallows, and the first three of them were hanged in Sarajevo

388 BLACK LAMB AND GREY FALCON

four months later. The last two were reprieved and sentenced
to imprisonment for twenty years and for life respectively.
Princip, Chabrinovitch and Grabezh would have been hanged
had they not been under twenty-one. As it was, they received
sentences of twenty years’ imprisonment, one day of fast
each month, and twenty-four hours in a dungeon on every
anniversary of the twenty-eighth of June. The rest of the
conspirators were sentenced to terms of imprisonment ranging
from life down to three years. These were not excessive
sentences. In England Princip would have very rightly been
sent to the gallows. Nevertheless, the sequel is not such as
can be contemplated without horror and pity. Thirteen con-
spirators were sent to Austrian prisons. Before the end of the
war, which came three and half years later, nine of them had
died in their cells.

How this slow murder was contrived in the case of Princip
is known to us, through Slav guards and doctors. He was
taken to an eighteenth-century fortress at Theresienstadt,
between Prague and Dresden. The Austrians would not leave
him in Sarajevo because they already saw that the war was
not going as they had hoped, and they feared that Bosnia might
fall into Serbian hands. He was put in an underground cell
filled with the stench of the surrounding marshes, which received
the fortress sewage. He was in irons. There was no heating.
He had nothing to read. On St. Vitus’ Day he had sustained
a broken rib and a crushed arm which were never given proper
medical attention. At Theresienstadt the arm became tubercul-
ous and suppurated, and he contracted a fungoid infection on
the body. Three times he tried to commit suicide, but in his
cell there lacked the means either of life or of death. In 1917
his forearm became so septic that it had to be amputated. By
this time Chabrinovitch and Grabezh were both dead, it is
said of tuberculosis. Grabezh at any rate had been a per-
fectly healthy boy till his arrest. Princip never rallied after his
operation. He had been put in a windowless cell, and though he
could no longer be handcuffed, since the removal of his arm,
his legs were hobbled with heavy chains. In the spring of 1918
he died. He was buried at night, and immense precautions
were taken to conceal the spot. But the Austrian Empire had
yet to make the last demonstration of Schlamperei in connection
with the Sarajevo attentat. One of the soldiers who dug the

BOSNIA

389

grave was a Slav, and he took careful note of its position ; he
came forward after the peace and gave his information to the
Serbs. They were able to identify the body by its mutilations.

Princip appears to have suffered greatly under his im-
prisonment, though with courage. In his death, as in every-
thing we hear reported of his life, there was a certain noble
integrity of experience. He offered himself wholly to each
event in order that he might learn in full what revelation it had
to make about the nature of the universe. How little of a
demented fanatic he was, what qualities of restraint and
deliberation he brought to his part in the attentat, is revealed
by the testimony of the Czech doctor who befriended him in
prison. From the court records one would suppose him to be
without personal ties, to be perhaps an orphan, at any rate to
be wholly absorbed in politics. Yet to the Czech doctor he
spoke perpetually of his dear mother, of his brothers and their
children, and of a girl whom he had loved and whom he had
hoped to marry, though he had never kissed her.

Chabrinovitch took his punishment differently, and almost
certainly a little more happily. It chanced that in prison he
had momentary contact with Franz Werfel, the greatest of post-
war Austrian writers, who was working there as hospital orderly.
In an essay Werfel has recorded his surprise at finding that the
Slav assassin, whom he had imagined as wolfish and demented,
should turn out to be this delicate and gentle boy, smiling
faintly in his distress. It can be recognised from his account
that Chabrinovitch used in prison that quality which annoyed
his less-gifted friends, which was the antithesis, or perhaps the
supplement, of Princip's single-mindedness. He took all ex-
perience that came his way and played with it, discussed it,
overstated it, understated it, moaned over it, joked about it,
tried out all its intellectual and emotional potentialities. What
these youths did was abominable, precisely as abominable as
the tyranny they destroyed. Yet it need not be denied that
they might have grown to be good men, and perhaps great
men, if the Austrian Empire had not crashed down on them in
its collapse. But the monstrous frailty of Empire involves such
losses.

At the cemetery we forgot for a moment why we were there,
so beautifully does it lie in the tilted bowl of the town. It is
always so in Sarajevo. Because of the intricate contours of its

390 BLACK LAMB AND GREY FALCON

hills it is for ever presenting a new picture, and the mind runs
away from life to its setting. And when we had passed the
cemetery gates, we forgot again for another reason. Not far
away among the tombs there was a new grave, a raw wound in
the grass. A wooden cross was at its head, and burning candles
were stuck in the broken clay. At the foot of it stood a young
officer, his face the colour of tallow. He rocked backwards in
his grief, though very slightly, and his mouth worked with
prayer. His uniform was extremely neat. Yet once, while we
stared at him in shocked distress, he tore open his skirted coat
as if he were about to strip ; but instantly his hand did up the
buttons as if he were a nurse coolly tending his own delirium.

This was a Slav, this is what it is to be a Slav. He was offer-
ing himself wholly to his sorrow, he was learning the meaning
of death and was not refusing any part of the knowledge ; for
he knew that experience is the cross man must take up and
carry. Not for anything would he have chosen to feel one shade
less pain ; and if it had been joy he was feeling, he would have
permitted himself to feel all possible delight. He knew only
that in suffering or rejoicing he must not lose that control of the
body which enabled him to be a good soldier and to defend
himself and his people, so that they could endure experience
along their own path and acquire their own revelation of the
universe.

There is no other way of living which promises that man shall
ever understand his destiny better than he does, and live less
familiarly with evil. Yet to numberless people all over Europe,
to numberless people in Great Britain, this man would be loath-
some as a leper. It is not pleasant to feel pain, it is the act of
a madman to bare the breast to agony. It is not pleasant to
admit that we know almost nothing, so little that, for lack of
knowledge, our actions are wild and foolish. It is not pleasant
to be bound to the task of learning all our days, to be under the
obligation to go on learning even though it involves making
acquaintance with pain, although we know that we must die
still in ignorance. To do these things it is necessary to have
faith in what is entirely hidden and unknown, to cast away all
the acquisitions and certainties which would ensure a comfortable
existence lest they should impede us on a journey which may
never be accomplished, which never even offers comfort. There-
fore the multitudes in Europe who are not himgry for the truth

BOSNIA

391

would say : " Let us kill these Slavs with their dedication to
insanity, let us enslave them lest they make all wealth worthless
and introduce us at the end to God, who may not be pleasant
to meet."

The judge and the banker said, " Look, they are here."
Close to the palings of the cemetery, under three stone slabs, lie
the conspirators of Sarajevo, those who were hanged and five
of those who died in prison ; and to them has been joined Zhera-
itch, the boy who tried to kill the Bosnian governor General
Vareshanin and was kicked as he lay on the ground. The slab
in the middle is raised. Underneath it lies the body of Princip.
To the left and the right lie the others, the boys on one side and
the men on the other, for in this country it is recognised that the
difference between old and young is almost as great as that
between men and women. The grave is not impressive. It is
as if a casual hand had swept them into a stone drawer. There
was a battered wreath laid askew on the slabs, and candles
flickered in rusty lanterns. This untidiness means nothing. It
is the Moslem habit to be truthful about death, to admit that
what it leaves of our kind might just as well be abandoned to the
process of the earth. Only to those associated with a permanent
system, who were holy men or governors or great soldiers, do
Moslems raise tombs that are in any sense a monument, and
they are more careful to revere these than to keep them in order.
After all, a stone with a green stain of weed on it commemorates
death more appropriately than polished marble. This attitude
is so reasonable that it has spread from the Moslems to the
Christians in all territories where they are found side by side.
It does not imply insensibility. The officer swaying in front of
the cross on the new grave might never be wholly free of his
grief till he died, but this did not mean that he would derive any
satisfaction at all in making the grave look like part of a garden.
And as we stood by the shabby monument an old woman passing
along the road outside the cemetery paused, pressed her face
against the railings, looked down on the stone slab, and retreated
into prayer. Later a young man who was passing by with a cart
loaded with vegetables stopped and joined her, his eyes also set
in wonder on the grave, his hand also making the sign of the
cross on brow and breast, his lips also moving.

On their faces there was none of the bright acclaiming look
which shines in the eyes of those who talk of, say, Andreas Hofer.

BLACK LAMB AND GREY FALCON

39a

They seemed to be contemplating a mystery, and so they were ;
for the Sarajevo attentat is mysterious as history is m}^terious,
as life is mysterious. Of all the men swept into this great drawer
only one, Princip, had conceived what they were doing as a
complete deed. To Chabrinovitch it had been a hypothesis to
be used as a basis for experiment ; his vision of it came from
the brain only, and not from the blood. To some of the others
it had been an event interesting to imagine, which would cer-
tainly not be allowed to happen by the inertia we all feel in the
universe, the resistance life puts up against the human will,
particularly if that is making any special effort. To the rest, to
the unhappy peasants and tradesmen who found themselves quite
involuntarily helping the boys in their journey from the Serbian
frontier, it must have seemed as if the troubles of their land
had fused into a mindless catastrophe, like plague or famine.
But the deed as Princip conceived it never took place. It was
entangled from its first minute with another deed, a murder
which seems to have been fully conceived by none at all, but
which had a terrible existence as a fantasy, because it was
dreamed of by men whose whole claim to respect rested on their
realistic quality, and who abandoned all restraint when they
strayed into the sphere of fantasy. Of these two deeds there was
made one so potent that it killed its millions and left all living
things in our civilisation to some degree disabled. I write of a
mystery. For that is the way the deed appears to me, and to all
Westerners. But to those who look at it on the soil where it was
committed, and to the lands east of that, it seems a holy act of
liberation ; and among such people are those whom the West
would have to admit are wise and civilised.

This event, this Sarajevo attentat, was in these inconsistencies
an apt symbol of life : which is loose and purposeless, which
weaves a close pattern and doggedly pursues its ends, which is
unpredictable and illogical, which follows a straight line from
cause to effect, which is bad, which is good. It shows that
human will can do anything, it shows that accident does every-
thing. It shows that man throws away his peace for a vain cause
if he insists on acquiring knowledge, for the more one knows
about the attentat the more incomprehensible it becomes. It
shows also that moral judgment sets itself an impossible task.
The soul should choose life. But when the Bosnians chose life,
and murdered Franz Ferdinand, they chose death for the French

BOSNIA

393

and Germans and English, and if the French and Germans and
English had been able to choose life they would have chosen
death for the Bosnians. The sum will not add up. It is mad-
ness to wrack our brains over this sum. But there is nothing
else we can do except try to add up this sum. We are nothing
but arithmetical functions which exist for that purpose.

We went out by the new grave where the young ofRcer was
trying to add up the sum in the Slav way. A sudden burst
of sunshine made the candle-flames sadder than darkness. He
swayed so far forward that he had to stay himself by clutching
at the cross. His discipline raised him and set him swinging
back to his heels again.

Ilidzhe

We were going to see the village outside Sarajevo where the
Austrians built a racecourse and where Franz Ferdinand stayed
the night before he died. The road was so extravagantly bad
that we bounced like balls, and Constantine had a star of mud
on his forehead as he told us, " Sarajevo has a soul like a village,
though it is a town. Now, why has a village the sort of soul
that it has ? Because it is irrigated, because there flow through
it rivers of water and rivers of air. If there is water running
through a city it is no longer water, it is not clear, it might evoke
demonstrations of fastidiousness from a camel ; if there is air
blowing through the city it cannot be called wind, it loses its
force among the houses. So it is with movements in the mind,
they become polluted and efiete. Religion instead of being an
ecstasy and a cosmology becomes ethical, philosophical, peni-
tential. But in Sarajevo,” he continued, as the car lifted itself
out of a rut with a movement not to be expected from a machine,
credible only in a tiger leaping out of a pit, “ there is a vivifying
conception which irrigates the city and makes it fresh like a
village. Here Slavs, and a very fine kind of Slav, endowed with
great powers of perception and speculation, were confronted with
the Turkish Empire at its most magnificent, which is to say Islam
at its most magnificent, which is to say Persia at its most mag-
nificent. Its luxury we took, its militarism and its pride, and
above all its conception of love. The luxury has gone. The
militarism has gone. You saw at the railway station the other

394

BLACK LAMB AND GREY FALCON

morning yrhat had happened to the pride. But the conception
of love is still in the city, and it is a wonderful conception, it
refreshes and revivifies, it is clean water and strong wind.”

" What is peculiar about this conception of love ? ” asked
my husband, who had just been thrown on his knees to the floor
of the car. " It is,” said Constantine, failing to remove his
stomach from the small of my back, " the conception of love
which made us as small boys read the Arabian Nights with such
attention, so that Grandmamma always said, ‘ How he reads and
reads, we must make a priest of him.’ Is it not extraordinary,
by the way, that all over Europe, even in the pudic nurseries
of your own country, this should be regarded as a children’s
book ? It is as if our civilisation felt fear that it had carried too
far its experiment of bringing up children in innocence, but
would not admit it, and called in another race to administer all
that knowledge which had been suppressed, in an exotic and
disguised form, so that it could be passed off as an Eastern talis-
man engraved with characters which naturally cannot be read,
though they are to be admired aesthetically.” " About this
conception of love,” said my husband, struggling up to a seated
position and wiping the mud off his glasses, ” you mean the old
crones arriving with messages, and the beautiful women in
darkened rooms, and the hiding in jars ? ” “ Yes, that is it,”
said Constantine, " the old crones, very discreet, the pursuit of
the occasion that demanded faith, the flash of eye below a veil
lifted for only a second, the wave of a scarf from a lattice, which
was at once a promise of beauty and a challenge to cunning
and courage, for there might be a witty ambush hiding in jars
and there might be death from a eunuch’s sword. It is too
beautiful.

“ Too beautiful 1 ” he repeated, beaming as one cradled in
content though at the moment he was actually suspended in the
air. " It is a conception of love which demands that it should
be sudden and secret and dangerous. You from the West have
no such conception of love. It seems to you that love must be
as slow as the growth of a plant : a man and woman must come
throughout many months to a full understanding of each other’s
natures and take serious vows to fulfil each other’s needs. You
think also that a man insults a woman if he wishes to make
love to her without delay, and that a woman is worthless if
she gives herself to a man before they have killed a great part

BOSNIA

395

of the calendar. In this there is much truth. I remember that
when I was a young man in Paris, it sometimes happened that
though I had two mistresses there were times when I went out
into the street and took the first woman I met, and it was
because I am in part a barbarian and so I could not wait.
That was nothing. But love can be sudden and quite different
from that. It can be so ecstatic that it can come into full
being at a single encounter, that it needs only that encounter
to satisfy the lovers.

“ If you offered them a lifetime together you could not offer
them more than the night that follows when the old crone has
opened the door. No, the car is not going to turn over. And
when you come back next year the road will be better. We are
a young country, and we will do all, but we have not yet had the
time. Such love could properly be engendered by a single glance
from the eyes. Indeed it could not claim to be this kind of love,
this ultimate affinity, if the most infinitesimal contact was not
enough to declare it. That is why it must be sudden.

“ It must be secret because jealousy is a part of both this
sudden love and the other slow-moving kind. A man who per-
forms the miracle of keeping a woman happy for forty years
cannot bear it that on one night during those forty years another
man should be necessary for her happiness ; and a man who
meets a woman once and makes that meeting as fabulous in her
memory as a night spent in the moon cannot bear it that he
should not be the father of the eleven children whose noses she
wipes. Hence these men must not know of each other. We
roar like bulls about our honour, but so it is.

“ Also this love must be dangerous, or it would not be
itself. That is not to say that one does not value a thing unless
one has paid a great price for it — that is vulgar. But if a
woman did not know that to lift her veil before a stranger was
perhaps to die, she might perhaps lift it when she had received
no intimation of this great and sudden love : when she was
merely barbarian. And indeed neither she nor her lover could
fully consummate this kind of love without a sense of peril.
They would not shut the eyes of reason and precipitate them-
selves into the abyss of passion, unless they knew this might
be their last chance to experience it or, indeed, anything else.

“ It is a more marvellous conception of love, I think, than
anything other nations know. The French make love for the

396 BLACK LAMB AND GREY FALCON

sake of life ; and so like living it often falls to something less
than itself, to a little trivial round. The Germans make love
for the sake of death ; as they like to put off civilian clothes
and put on uniform, because there is more chance of being
killed, so they like to step out of the safe casual relations of
society and let loose the destructive forces of sex. So it was
with ' Werther ’ and ' Elective Affinities ’, and so it was in the
years after the war, when they were so promiscuous that sex
meant nothing at all. And this is not to speak ill of the French
and Germans, for the love of life and the love of death are both
necessary things. But this conception unites love of life and
death in a single experience. Such lovers are conscious at once
of the extremity of danger and that which makes danger most
terrible and at the same time most worth challenging.”

“ But that is the essence of all adventure,” said my husband,

“ and indeed it is the essence of ” *' Yes, yes, what you say

is very true,” said Constantine, as he always does when he
intends that the person who is talking to him shall talk no more.
“ It is this conception of love which gives life to the city of
Sarajevo. How far this tradition exists to-day I cannot tell.
But I think that even now old women are sometimes sent with
messages that must be read by only one person, and 1 think
that the plum trees would not blossom so freely round those
little restaurants on the hillside above the town if some god or
goddess had not been placated by sacrifice.” " You think,”
said my husband, " the rose never grows one half so red."
" But I am sure,” continued Constantine, " that the conception
gives the town a special elegance. The men and women in it
have another dimension given to their lives, because they have
kept in their hearts the capacity for this second kind of love.
They are not mutilated by its suppression, and they have hope.
All of them may yet have this revelation, and some of them
have actually had it. I think that is why so many of the women
here have lips and eyes that shine like children’s, and why the
men are not bitter or grudging or hurried. A sensuality that
is also a mysticism,” he cried, “ what can a race invent better
for itself ? But here is Ilidzhe, here is our marvellous Ilidzhe ! ”
He leaped in one second from well-buttered reverie to shaking
indignation. " Ilidzhe, our Potemkin village ! They built it
to show the foreign visitors how well they had imposed civilisa-
tion on our barbarism, just as Potemkin built villages on the

BOSNIA

397

steppes to impress the foreign ambassadors with Russian
prosperity, hollow villages that were built the day before and
were pulled down the day after. Come, look at their civilisation,
at our barbarity 1 "

The spa waited for us behind the scrubby, half-forested
edge of a park, and indeed it was not pleasing. In earlier days
it had certainly been better kept ; it now looked like any of the
other Yugoslavian spas, which are patronised by the peasants
and small shopkeepers, and showed a certain homely untidiness,
though nothing worse. But the place was unengaging in its
architectural essence. A string of shapeless hotels was joined
by a covered corridor to a central restaurant and pump-room, a
pudding of a place. Every building was smothered in heavy
porches and balustrades and balconies of craftless but elaborate
woodwork. The hotels were all closed at the moment, they did
not open till the heat brought people out of the city ; and we
strolled about looking for the proprietor of the Hotel Bosnia,
the largest of the hotels, at which Franz Ferdinand and Sophie
Chotek had spent their last night. “ I think that they have
kept the chapel that was made for their coming,” said Con-
stantine, ” and I know they keep their room as it was, for I
have seen it. It was the suite reserved always for the Royal
Family and for the governor, and it was altogether Moslem,
but a terrible Moslem. It was like a place I have seen in your
London, when I was there for Eve days during the war, called
the Kardomah Cafe ; all little inlaid tables and a clutter of
many things, whereas, as you have seen, the chief furniture
of a Moslem house is the light. Also I would like you to meet
my friend who is the director of the spa, he has a very beautiful
wife and her sister, who would like to talk to you about Tenny-
son’s Idylls of the King. They read nothing else, they would
be Enid and Guinevere.” He waved his arms as if he were
wearing long flowing sleeves, and pulled out his neck to its
most swanlike. " But here is a man with keys.”

They fitted, however, only the door of a little shop in the
Hotel Bosnia’s arcade ; but the man was glad to have a talk.
“ He says,” said Constantine, “ that they do their best to keep
the place neat, but that there is not enough money to do much.
Many people come here in summer, but they are not rich, like
the nobles who used to come here from Austria and Germany
and England to see how beautifully Bosnia was being governed

398 BLACK LAMB AND GREY FALCON

by the Austrian Empire. But he would not have it different,
though he has been here since a child and loves the place, for
he is a very patriotic Yugoslav. But really it is disgusting, this
Ilidzhe. They did nothing for the country, but they built these
hotels and the racecourse which I am going to show you
presently, and all the grand people came and looked at it and
said, ‘ Ah, it is so in Bosnia, all weeded gravel paths and new
houses and good beer, it is too good for these cattle of Slavs
He mimicked the tone of a fine lady, turning his face from side
to side and twirling an imaginary open parasol.

The man with the keys had been watching. He suddenly
threw down his keys on to the pavement and began to shout
straight past us to the horizon : like the young man at Trsat,
like the young man on the boat whose soup was cold, like the
hotel manager from Hvar. " Yes, yes,” he cried, " and they
had our men and women brought in to dance the kolo to them,
we were for them the natives, the savages, and we had to dance
for them as if we were bears at a fair.” He bent and picked up
the keys, then remembered something and threw them down
again. " And what they did to us as soldiers ! They made us
become soldiers, and when a man goes into battle he may be
called before his God, and they made us Christians wear the
fez! Yes, the fez of the accursed Turks weis the headgear of
all our four Bosnian regiments ! ”

He picked up his keys for the second time and led us along
the corridor to the railway station, which indeed was very
grand, in the manner of Baden-Baden or Marienbad. " I find
this grotesquely unpleasing,” I said. " I did not bring you here
to please you," said Constantine, " when I take you to see things
that were left by the Turks and the Austrians it is not to please
you, it is so that you shall understand. And now, will you
please look where I tell you ? This station is very untidy, is it
not ? The paint has gone and there are no flowers growing
in wire cages. Will you please look at the chestnut tree that
stands in the middle of this piece of gravel outside the station ?
Do you see that there are growing round it many weeds ?
Now, I apply a test. If you are saved, if you know what the
soul is and what a people is, you will be able to see that that
tree is better now, standing among weeds, than it was when
it was spick and span ; for these weeds are the best we can
do, they are all the order we can yet attain in Bosnia, and the

BOSNIA

399

spickness and spanness came from another people, and were
therefore nothingness, they could not exist here, because they
were not part of the national process.” " There I cannot agree,”

I said. " I do not believe that it was wrong of the English to
drain India and abolish suttee, I do not believe that the P^es*
Blancs did wrong in medicining the sicknesses of Africa.” ” Do
1 not know such things must be done ? " said Constantine.
” We Yugoslavs are stamping out malaria in Macedonia and
we are raising up peasants that have been trodden into the mud
by the Turks. But it should be done by one’s people, never by
strangers." " Rats,” said my husband ; “ if a people have
wholly gone under, without a fringe that has kept its independ-
ence and its own folk-ways, strangers must butt in and help it
get on its feet again. The trouble is that the kind of stranger
who likes helping unfortunate people usually does not get
leave to set about it unless other members of his group see a
military or commercial advantage to be got out of it. But if
you mean that the Bosnians had enough force and enough
remnants of the old Slav culture to look after themselves once
they got the Turks off their necks, and that the Austrians had
nothing to give them and had no business here, then I’m with
you.” “ Ah, you have said something true and so untidy,”
complained Constantine, “ and what I said was not quite true,
but so beautifully neat.”

But it was where the racecourse drew its white diagram on
the gardeny plains that the irrelevance of the Austrian interven-
tion appeared most apparent. The scene was now enchanting.
All over the course sheep and cattle were grazing on the turf,
ringing faint little bells as they were pressed on by comfortable,
slow-moving greed or met the active air, not quite a wind,
which flowed quietly down the great tawny valley that led back
to Sarajevo. Where there was not grass the earth showed red ;
and the poplars stood like jets of chill green-gold light. Scat-
tered on the plains were the rough white farms and cottages
of Christians ; and on every slope which promised a fine view
there stood a Moslem villa, smoothly and solidly white among
the white clouds of its orchard. One such villa stood on a little
hill close by the racecourse, as compact a delight as if an
enormous deal of spring had been boiled down till it would
fill just a little pot, according to the method of making rose-
leaf jam.

400

BLACK LAMB AND GREY FALCON

And the white rails, of course, recalled another delight. I
saw a string of horses going like a line of good poetry, under a
cloudless morning on Lamboum Downs. I remembered what
the author of the Book of Job had said about the horse : " The
glory of his nostrils is terrible. He paweth the valley and re-
joiceth in his strength. He saith among the trumpets, Ha, ha,
and he smelleth the battle afar off, the thunder of the captains,
and the shouting ...” A pleasure, undoubtedly, but how
irrelevant to the starving Bosnian peasant, and how irrelevant,
how insolent to Sarajevo. The scenery before me was distress-
ing in its evocation of Austrian society as it was in the time of
Franz Josef, as Metternich had foreseen it must become if the
Empire was not allowed some measure of freedom. Banality
rose from the tomb and stood chattering about the lawns :
women with heavy chins and lively untender eyes and blonde
frizzes of hair under straw boaters, wearing light blouses and
long skirts and broad waistbands, men with the strongly marked
expressions of ventriloquists’ dummies, with sloping shoulders
and ramrod backs. They chattered loudly, with the exaggerated
positiveness of those who live in a negative world. They were
Catholics who could nourish among them a ” Los von Rom ”
movement, they were cosmopolitans who lived by provincial
standards, they were bound by etiquette and recognised no
discipline, they were the descendants of connoisseurs yet neither
produced nor appreciated great art, they sacrificed all civil
interests to a military caste that proved as soon as war broke
out to be wholly civilian in everything but its splendid and
suicidal valour.

These people had come to govern, to change, to civilise such
men and women as we had seen in Sarajevo : the Jews with
their tradition of fine manners and learning ; the Moslems
with their houses full of light and their blossoming gardens and
dedication to peaceful nature ; the old women we had seen in
the market-place, whose souls had attained to wit ; the men
whose long strides were endurance itself, who would know, like
our friend with the keys, that an honest man must not dance
before tyrants nor go to his God in the fez. These women in
blouses and skirts had come as examples of the fashion to those
who had worn Persian brocades since West was on visiting terms
with East ; the ramrod men had come to command such as the
officer who had stood swaying by the new grave. The builders

BOSNIA

401

of these horrible hotels, of the little covered corridor that looked
as if one end of it might have led to the old Dnice’s Bazaar in
Baker Street, had come to Sarajevo, the town of a hundred
mosques, to teach and not to learn

Treboviche

Later that afternoon we drove out of Sarajevo by the road
that leads to Treboviche, the mountain which rises too near
the town and too steeply to be seen from it. The craned neck
can only see its foothills. Half-way up we stopped the auto-
mobile and stood on a grassy ledge to see the orchards and
villas lying beneath us, all little pots of spring jam, like the villa
by the racecourse. On a ledge above us were standing some
gipsies, eight or nine girls in jackets and trousers of printed
curtain stuffs, and two men who were jumping and gesticulating
in front of them, the upturned toes of their leather sandals
looking like cockspurs. Something about the gestures of
Constantine’s plump little arms as he showed us the city brought
them tumbling about us. A good many people of the lettered
sort recognise Constantine from his caricatures in the papers ;
but the unlettered see him for what he is with astonishing
quickness. He has only to swing an eloquent hand at a street-
corner and there are men and vromen about us looking at him
with an expression which sums up the twofold attitude of
ordinary folk to the poet ; a mixture of amused indulgence,
as of a grown-up watching a child at play, and ecstatic expecta-
tion, as of a child waiting for a grown-up to tell it a fairy-story.
These gipsies ran down the grassy slope and stood about us
giggling in a circle of crimson and plum and blue and green and
lemon and cinnabar, the wind blowing out their full trousers and
making them hug their shawls under the chin. They bring a
lovely element into a community which allows them to exist
without sinking into squalor. It is as if one could go out and
make love to a flower, or have foxes and hares to play music
at one’s parties.

The higher rocks above the road were pale green with
hellebores, and there were primroses and cowslips and cyclamen
and at last the faded mauve flames of crocus. Then we came to
the snow, lying thinly on scaurs and under pinewoods. Where it

BLACK LAMB AND GREY FALCON

402

deepened we left the car and walked past a house which might
have been a Swiss chalet, had it not been for the music that
someone within was plucking from the strings of a gusla, to a
peak shoulder crusted in ice and deep with snow where there
was a shadowed seam. About us were the smouldering Bosnian
uplands, their heathy heights red with last year's autumn,
though in some valleys the first touch of spring had given a
spinney or an alp a hard mineral viridity. These heights and
valleys run neither north nor south nor west nor east, but in all
ways for a mile at a time, so that the landscape turns like a
merry-go-round. Beyond these broken and burning highlands
lay a wall of amber cloud, and above this rose two unknown
ranges, one reflecting on its snows the brightness of an afternoon
that was for us already dimmed, the other crimson with an
evening that had not yet reached us. Sarajevo we could not
see : the valley that runs down from it was a vast couch for a
white river, until it twisted and broke and broadened and
couched several rivers, which in winding spread their whiteness
in mist. Over all the nearer highlands was cast a web of paths
joining the villages across the tawny distance ; and from some
of them, though they were a mile or two away, came sounds of
playing children and barking dogs.

Cold, we went back to the chalet and drank warming coffee
under the pictures of the boy King and his mother and his
murdered father. They are found in every public place in
Yugoslavia, even Croatia. I think they are present in anti-
Serb territory because they are sold by some charitable society
which nobody wishes to refuse, but in other parts, where there
lingers the medieval conception of the king as a priest of the
people, they have nearly the status of holy pictures. At the
back of the room sat a handsome young man playing the gusla
and singing, apparently the proprietor, and two very pretty
young women, all with that characteristically Slav look which
comes from the pulling of the flesh down from the flat cheek-
bones by the tense pursing of the mouth. On the face of the
murdered King there was the same expression, hardened to
woodenness by the fear of death coming from assassination
without or tuberculosis within.

Constantine drank his coffee, pushed away his cup, and said,
“When you look at things, try to remember them wholly,
because you have soon to go home to England. I think of a

BOSNIA

403

story I heard from a monk of how King Alexander came to see
the frescoes in his monastery which contained portraits of our
Serbian kings of our old Empire, in the thirteenth century,
which are real portraits, mind you. Before one he stood for
three-quarters of an hour, looking terribly, as one would look
on one’s father if he came back from the dead, sucking him with
the eyes. The monk asked him if he had a special cult for this
king, and he said, ‘ No. For all kings of Serbia must I have a
cult. All kings I must understand, in order that the new
dynasty be grafted on the old. And this king I must make a
special effort to understand, since nothing that is written of him
makes him quite clear to me.* You see, he was a mystic, and
because the channel of his m3rsticism was Yugoslavia, nobody
outside Yugoslavia can understand him.”

He put his elbows on the table and rumpled his little black
curls. " Nobody outside Yugoslavia understands us,” he com-
plained. " We have a very bad press, particularly with the
high-minded people, who hate us because we are mystics and
not just intelligent, as they are. Ach ! that Madame Genevi6ve
Tabouis, how she writes of us in her Paris newspaper ! She
suspects us of being anti-democratic in our natures, when we
Serbs are nothing but democratic, but cannot be because the
Italians and the Germans are watching us to say, ' Ah, here is
Bolshevism, we must come in and save you from it.’ And
really she is not being high-minded when she makes this
mistake, she makes it because she hates the Prime Minister,
Mr. Stoyadinovitch ; and it is not that she hates him because
he is a bad man, she hates him just because they are opposites.
She is little and thin and fine, he is a great big man with a strong
chest and much flesh that all comes with him when he moves ;
she finds all relationships difficult, and all men and women
follow him as if he were a great horse ; she is noble when
she loves her country, and when he loves his country it is as
natural as when he sweats ; and en somme he likes wine and
can drink it, all sorts of wine, red wine, white wine, champagne,
little wines of our country and great wines of France, and she
must drink only a little drop of mineral water from a special spa,
and of that she has a special source. So they hate each other,
and since she is idealistic and is therefore ashamed that she
should hate people for the kind of marrow they have in their
spines, she pretends to herself she hates Yugoslavia. And yet

BLACK LAMB AND GREY FALCON

she is great in her way. But not so great, my pardon to your
wife, my dear sir, who I know is a lady writer also, as Mr.
Stoyadinovitch. ’ ’

I never heard anybody else in Yugoslavia speak well of
Stoyadinovitch except Constantine ; but Constantine was
sincere. He laid his cheek on the table, and drew his folded
hands back and forward across his forehead. “ There is some-
thing," I said, " which has been worrying me ever since I stood
by the tomb of the atteniaters, and what you said at Ilidzhe
this morning has intensified my perplexity. Listen. The pre-
dominantly German character of the Hapsburg monarchy,
and the concessions it had to make to the Hungarians, meant
that the Austro-Hungarian Empire oppressed its Slavs and
feared the kingdom of Serbia as a dangerous potential ally to
these discontented subjects. At the same time there were
economic conditions in the Austro-Hungarian Empire which
meant that there must be sooner or later a revolt, in which these
discontented Slavs would be specially likely to bear the brunt
of the fighting. Therefore precisely this war that happened in
1914 was bound to happen sooner or later.” " But certainly,"
said Constantine, " it had nearly happened in 1912, when Franz
Ferdinand’s friends all but succeeded in starting a preventive
war over Albania.” “ Then it mattered not at all what hap-
pened in Sarajevo on June twenty-eighth, 1914,” I said. Con-
stantine was silent for a minute. The man behind us stopped
playing his gusla, as if he understood what had been said.
Constantine said, " In a sense you are right. The little ones
need not have died. And of the two big ones, the poor angiy one
could have gone on shooting his beasts, and the poor striving one
could have continued to strive after the little things the other poor
ones did not want her to have. We should have had the World
War just the same." " What a waste ! ” I said. " Well, Sara-
jevo is the one town I know that could bear with equanimity
the discovery that her great moment was a delusion, a folly, a
simple extravagance,” said Constantine. " She would walk by
her river, she would sit under the fruit tree in her courtyard,
and she would not weep.” But after a pause he added, “ But
she is not an imbecile. If she would not weep it is because of her
knowledge that we are wrong. By the attentat she took the war
and made it a private possession of the South Slavs. Behind the
veil of our incomprehensible language and behind the veil of

BOSNIA

40s

lies the Austrians and Hungarians have told about us and our
wrongs, the cause of the war — more than that, the reason for
the war, is eternally a mystery to the vast majority of the people
who took part in it and were martyrised by it. Perhaps that is
something for us South Slavs, to know a secret that is hidden
from everybody else. I do not know. How I wish,” he said,
standing up, " that we could stay here to-night. There are such
honest little rooms upstairs, with coarse clean sheets, and it is
so quiet. That is to say there are many noises but they all have
a meaning, it is this bird that cries or that, whereas the noises
in a city mean nothing. But if we are going to Yaitse to-morrow
we must go down to the town.”

It was not yet dark. As we came down we could still see
the cyclamen and the primroses and the cowslips on the banks
of the road, looking sweetly melancholy as flowers do when seen
by other than full light. When we were half-way down the
dusk was deep blue, and we stopped the car when we came to
the knoll where we had stood beside the gipsies, in order to look
down on the scattered lights of Sarajevo. But our chauffeur
called out to us from the car, pointing at the city. ” He is asking
you to listen to the bells," said Constantine. “ They are sounding
all over the city, and it is a great thing for him, because when the
Turks were here there might be no church bells. This man’s
father, or his grandfather, told him of the time, sixty years ago,
when they were not allowed, and he feels proud that they are
there now."

Travnik

On our way out of Sarajevo the next morning we stopped
to buy oranges, and I filled my lap with white violets and
cowslips and marigolds ; and so we started on a morning’s
drive through valleys which might have been landscaped by
Capability Brown, so prettily were the terraces set and planted,
so neat was the line the climbing woodlands drew against the
hilltop moor. This is in part due to geologicai accident, but
it is also true that hereabouts man has the neatest of hands.
He is extremely poor, but he can work miracles with his
restricted materials. We came presently to a little spa called
Kiselyak, a very old spa, which was popular, particularly among
the Jews, in the Turkish times. 1 suppose that in the last
VOL. I 2 D

4o6 black lamb AMD GREY FALCON

twenty-five years the mass of people who had stayed there were
on the same financial level as those in England who have an
income of five pounds a week or under. The place was as
pretty as a musical-comedy set. In the main street there was
a long low Park Hotel, plastered white as snow, with a brightly
striped mattress taking the air at every window, which it seemed
could not have been put there in answer to mere necessity, so
gay was the pattern.

To admire it, we left the car and crossed a little stream to a
pinewood where there stood an artlessly built bath-house and
drinking-fountains. On the bridge there was an elderly Moslem
contemplating the running water. Always, in this part of the
world, where there is running water, there is an elderly Moslem
contemplating it. He joined our party without intrusiveness,
and pointed out to us a cafe near by, a wooden summer-house
built over the stream in a thicket of willows which he rightly
thought particularly pleasing, and then he took us over to
the drinking-booths and found a Christian gardener, who un-
locked them and gave us cu]}s of water. It had a fortifying
taste of metal. We strolled along a path through the pinewood
and came on a black marble monument from which a gold
inscription had been savagely excised. The Moslem and the
gardener, who had been following us at a few paces’ distance,
came forward to tell us that it had been put up to commemorate
a victory of the Austrian Army over the Bosnian insurgents.
“ Would you rather have things as they are now ? " said Con-
stantine. They agreed that they would, and we all sat down on
a bench, while I finished my cup of water.

“ I want to stay here, 1 do not want to go on," 1 said. " It
is the Moslem who is making you feel like that," said Con-
stantine, “ that is the great art of the Moslem ; and mind you,
that is very interesting, for, look at him, he is a Slav like the
gardener, who has it not. It is the Turks and his religion that
have taught him to sit and do nothing so very nicely. He would
be content to sit here all day, just as we are doing now ; and
indeed it would be most pleasant, for we would listen to the
stream and watch the clouds above the tree-tops, and we would
smoke and sometimes we would exchange polite remarks.” We
stayed there, just as he said, for nearly half an hour. The feeling
was as in one of the delightful households to be found in Bath,
where there are beautiful manners and beautiful furniture and a

BOSNIA

407

complete sense of detachment from modern agitation. But
there was not the anxiety about income tax which usually mars
such interiors. The Moslem was as poor as can be, even here :
he was in neatly mended rags, his leather sandals were tied up
with string.

On our way again, such poverty was all about us. The
mosques were no longer built of stone and bricks, but were
roughly plastered like farm buildings, with tiled roofs and
rickety wooden minarets. But they had still a trace of elegance
in their design ; and there were fine embroideries on the boleros
the women wore over their white linen blouses and dark full
trousers, and on the shirts of the black-browed men. With
some of these people we could not get on friendly terms. If they
were in charge of horses they looked at us with hatred, because
the horses invariably began to bolt at the sight of the auto-
mobile, however much we slowed down. We sent two hay-
carts flying into the ditch. So rarely had these people seen
automobiles that they looked at us with dignified rebuke, as
at vulgarians who insisted on using an eccentric mode of con-
veyance which put other travellers to inconvenience. But the
people who had no horses to manage looked at us with peculiar
respect, since automobiles passed so rarely that it seemed to
them certain that my husband and Constantine must be im-
portant officials from Belgrade. With a stylised look of stern-
ness the men saluted and stood to attention while we passed.
“ Look at their faces,” said Constantine ; “ they think that all
the time they must die for Yugoslavia, and they cannot under-
stand why we do not ask them to do that, but that now we ask
another thing, that they should live and be happy.”

The road climbed to a wide valley, where spring winds
were hurrying across wet emerald pastiu'es, and through woods
sharply green where winter had left them, and bronze where it
still dawdled. Little pink pigs and red foals ran helter skelter
before our coming, and men and women in gorgeous clothes,
more richly coloured than in the lower valleys, chased after them,
but paused to laugh and greet us. In the distance loomed
mountains, holding on their ledges huge blocks of monastic
buildings. These are among the few relics of the Austrian
occupation other than barracks ; it was here that the Empire
made the headquarters of their attempt to Catholicise the Bos-
nians who belonged to the Orthodox Church. The Dominicans

4o8 black lamb AND GREY FALCON

and the Franciscans, who had been here for seven hundred
years, were reinforced, not altogether to their own pleasure, by
the Jesuits.

At the base of these mountains we touched it, the town which
for good reason was called by the Turks Travnik, or Grassy-
town. Narrow houses with tall and shapely slanting tiled roofs
sit gracefully, like cats on their haunches, among the green
gardens of a garden-like valley. Here, in this well-composed
littleness, which lies snug in the field of the eye, can be enjoyed
to perfection the Moslem counterpoint of the soft horizontal
whiteness of fruit blossom and the hard vertical whiteness of
minarets. This town was the capital of Bosnia for two centuries
under the Turks, the seat of the Pasha from the time that Sara-
jevo would not have him, and it has a definite urban distinction,
yet it is countryfied as junket. “ This is where the Moslem at
Kiselyak would like to have a house,” said my husband, " if he
ever let himself want anything he did not have.”

We had been invited to luncheon with the father and mother
of the lovely Jewess in Sarajevo whom we called the Bulbul, and
we found their home in an apartment house looking over the
blossoming trench of the valley from the main road, under a
hill crowned with a fortress built by the old Bosnian kings.
We found it, and breathed in our nostrils the odour of another
civilisation. Our appearance there caused cries of regret. The
father stood in the shadow of the doorway, a handsome man in
his late fifties, whose likeness I had seen often enough in the
Persian miniatures, gazelle-eyed and full-bodied. In the de-
licious voice of the Sephardim, honey-sweet but not cloying, he
told us that he was ashamed to let us in, for we would find
nothing worthy of us. He had thought we meant to call at his
factory, which was a couple of miles outside the town, so he had
ordered a real meal, a meal appropriate to us, to be cooked
there, and he had left an explanation that he could not be with
us, as his wife had broken her ankle and till she was well he
would eat all his meals with her. He bowed with shame that
he should have blundered so. But a voice, lovely as his own
but a woman's, cried from the darkened room beyond and bade
him bring the strangers in. It was at once maternal, warm
with the desire to do what could be done to comfort our foreign-
ness, and childlike, breathless with a desire to handle the
new toy.

BOSNIA

409

She lay on a sofa, fluttering up against the downward pull
of her injury, as hurt birds do ; and she was astonishing in the
force of her beauty. She was at least in her late forties, and she
was not one of those prodigies unmarked by time, but she was
as beautiful, to judge by her effect on the beholder, as the
Bulbul. That could not really be so, of course. As a general
rule -Horace must be right, for reasons connected with the fatty
deposits under the skin and the working of the ductless glands,
when he writes, " O matre pulchra filia pulchrior Yet in this
case he would have been wrong. He should have ignored his
metre and written of “ Mater pulchrior pulcherrimae filiae ”,
for there was the more beautiful mother of the most beautiful
daughter. The Bulbul was the most perfect example conceivable
of the shining Jewish type, but so long as one looked on this
woman she seemed lovelier than all other women. Her age was
unimportant because it did not mean to her what it means to
most Western women : she had never been frustrated, she had
always been rewarded for her beautiful body and her beautiful
conduct by beautiful gratitude.

My husband and I sat down beside her, smiling as at an
unexpected present ; and she apologised to us for the poor meal
she would have to improvise, and cried over our heads directions
to her cook in a voice that floated rather than carried, and then
settled to ask us questions which were by Western standards
personal, which were extremely sensible if she wished to be able
to like us quickly before we left her house. In a painted cage
a canary suddenly raised fine-drawn but frantic cheers for the
universe, and they checked it with gentle laughter that could not
have hurt its feelings. The canary, it seemed, her husband had
brought home to divert her while she must lie on the sofa. The
room was littered with gifts he had fetched her for that purpose :
a carved flute, a piece of brocade, an eighteenth-century book
of Italian travel with coloured illustrations, an amber box — a
trifle, I should say, for each day she had been kept in the house.
Their household rocked gently on a tide of giving and receiving.

They watched us sadly while we ate, uttering coos of regret
for the meal that was really worthy of us, waiting uneaten in the
factory. But we were not discontented. We were given home-
made spaghetti, those eggs called “ Spanish eggs ” which are
boiled for three days in oil and come out greaseless and silky to
the palate, lamb chops from small aethereal lambs who prob-

410 BLACK LAMB AND GREY FALCON

ably had wings, sheep's cheese, pure white and delicately sharp,
peaches and quinces foundered in syrup that kept all their
summer flavour, and raki, the colourless brandy loved by Slavs.
As we ate we told them of our meetings with their daughter in
Sarajevo, and they stretched like cats in pride and pleasure,
owning that all we said of her was true, and reciting some of
her accomplishments that they thought we might not have had
the chance to observe. Nothing could have been less like the
uneasy smile, the deprecating mumble, which is evoked in an
Englishman by praise of his family.

But this was a long way from England. Constantine went on
to tell the gossip he had picked up in Sarajevo and the more
ambassadorial gossip he had brought from Belgrade, and while
they rewarded his perfect story-telling by perfect listening, I
looked about the room. It was certainly provincial ; anything
that had reached the room from Vienna, Berlin, Paris or London
had taken so long to get there, and had been so much modified
by the thought of the alien taste for which it was destined, that
it would be antiquated and bizarre. But built into this room,
and inherent in every word and gesture of its owners, was a
tradition more limited in its scope than the traditions of Vienna,
Berlin, Paris or London, but w'ithin its limits just as ancient and
sure and competent. Whatever event these people met they
could outface ; the witness to that was their deep serenity. They
would meet it with a formula compounded of Islam and Judaism.
Their whole beings breathed the love of pleasure which is the
inspiration of Sarajevo, which was perhaps the great contribu-
tion the Turks had to make to crilture. But it was stabilised, its
object was made other than running water, by the Jewish care
for the continuity of the race. It was a fusion that would infuri-
ate the Western moralist, who not only believes but prefers that
one should not be able to eat one’s cake and have it. I went
later to comb my hair and wash my hands in these people’s
bathroom. A printed frieze of naked nymphs dancing in a
forest ran from wall to wall, and several pictures bared the
breasts and thighs of obsoletely creamy beauties. Naively it
was revealed that these people thought of the bath as the un-
covering of nakedness, and of nakedness as an instrument of
infinite delight. It was the seraglio spirit in its purity ; and it
was made chaste as snow by the consideration that these people
would have offered this flesh of which they so perfectly under-

BOSNIA

411

stood the potentialities to bum like tallow in flame if thereby
they might save their dearer flesh, their child.

So one can have it, as the vulgar say, both ways. Indeed
one can have a great deal more than one has supposed one could,
if only one lives, as these people did, in a constant and loyal
state of preference for the agreeable over the disagreeable. It
might be thought that nothing could be easier, but that is not
the case. We in the West find it almost impossible, and are
caught unawares when we meet it in practice. That was brought
home to me by this woman’s tender gesture of farewell. First
she took all the lilacs from a vase beside her sofa and gave them
to me, but then felt this was not a sufficient civility. She made
me lay down the flowers, and took a scent-bottle from her table
and sprinkled my hands with the scent, gently rubbing it into
my skin. It was the most gracious farewell imaginable, and
the Western world in which I was born would not have approved.

There sounded in my mind’s ear the probable comment
of a Western woman : " My dear, it was too ghastly, she
seized me by the hands and simply drenched them with some
most frightful scent. I couldn’t get rid of it for days.” Their
fastidiousness would, of course, have been bogus, for the scent
was exquisite, a rich yet light derivative from Bulgarian attar of
roses. These people were infallible in their judgment on such
matters, having been tutored for centuries by their part in the
luxury trade between Bosnia and Tsarigrad, as they named
Constantinople ; and she had assumed that persons of our kind
would have a like education and would recognise that this scent
was of the first order. She had also assumed that I would like
to receive a gift which showed that somebody who had not
known me two hours before now liked me. She assumed, in
fact, that I too preferred the agreeable to the disagreeable.
Remembering the grey ice that forms on an Englishman’s face
as he is introduced to a stranger, I reflected that she was too
audacious in her assumption.

Before we left the town her husband took us for a stroll. A
lane wound among the mosques and villas through gardens that
held much plum blossom and lilac and irises and, here and there,
among the shrubs, the innocent playfulness of witch-balls.
Travnik had changed its aspect now, as a town does after one
has eaten salt in one of its houses. It is no longer something
painted on one’s retina, it is third-dimensional, it is a being and

BLACK LAMB AND GREY FALCON

41a

a friend or an enemy. We climbed up to the old castle, which is
a fortress now, and were met by very grave young soldiq?.
Slav soldiers look devout and dedicated even when they are
drunk ; these sober boys, guarding their white town and pale*
green valley, were as nuns. There had been an intention of
calling on the commandant, but the young soldiers said he was
asleep. They looked at us for some time before they told us this,
and spoke sadly and with an air of pronouncing judgment ; and
1 think that perhaps they thought that their commandant was
a sacred being, and that it would be a profanation to disturb
him for the sake of three men not in uniform and a woman no
longer young. They bade us good-bye with a worried air, as if
they wished they were sure they had done right. All to them
was still of great moment.

We followed a little path down a grassy hill, miraculously un-
tainted as glades are on the edge of Moslem towns, to a big pool
lying among trees. It was fed by three springs, each burstingfrom
the mauve shelter of a clump of cyclamen. It was dammed by a
steep stone wall, broken at one end by a channel through which
the waters burst in a grooved sliver that looked to be as solid
as crystal. We admired it for a long time as if it were a matter
of great importance ; and then we went down to the main road
and found a caf^ which had settled itself in snug melancholy at
the corner of a Moslem graveyard, near by the pompous canopied
tombs of a couple of pashas.

There we sat and drank black coffee and ate Turkish delight
on toothpicks, while a gentle wind stirred the flowering trees
that met above the table, and set the grasses waving round a
prostrate pillar which had fallen by one of the viziers’ tombs.
There strolled up and sat down some of these mysterious
impoverished and dignified Moslems who seem to have no
visible means of support, but some quite effective invisible
means. They watched us without embarrassment ; we were
unembarrassed ; and the men talked of country pastures. Here,
the Bulbul’s father said, was real game for shooting in winter.

There is deep snow here in winter-time, it seems ; and the
beasts come down from the heights and loiter hungrily on the
outskirts of the town. A friend of his had sauntered a few
yards out of his garden, his gun loaded with pellets. He
paused to look at a black bush that had miraculously escaped
the snow. It stood up and was a bear, a lurch away. His

BOSNIA

4>3

friend raised his gun and shot. The pellets found the bear’s
brain through the eye, he staggered, charged blindly and fell
dead. He himself had been driving down to his factory one
November afternoon when he saw a pack of wolves rushing
down the mountain on a herd of goats. He stopped his car
and watched. They came straight down like the water we had
seen rushing down by the dam. They leaped on the goats and
ate what they wanted. He had heard the goats’ bones cracking,
as loud, he said, as gunshots. When the wolves had eaten their
fill they rushed up the mountain again, dragging what was left
of the goats. It took only five minutes, he thought, from the
time he first saw them till they passed out of sight.

He pointed up to the mountains. " It is only in winter you
see them," he said, “ but all the same they are up there, waiting
for us and the goats." We looked in wonder at the heights
that professed the stark innocence of stone, that was honey-
combed with the stumbling weighty hostility of bears, the
incorporated rapacity of wolves. And as we lowered our eyes
we saw that we were ourselves being regarded with as much
wonder by other eyes, which also were speculating what the
sterile order of our appearance might conceal. A gaunt peasant
woman with hair light and straight and stiff as hay and a
mouth wide as a door had stopped in the roadway at the sight
of us. She was so grand, so acidulated, so utterly at a dis-
advantage before almost anyone in the civilised world, and so
utterly unaware of being at a disadvantage at all, that I made
Constantine ask her to let herself be photographed. She
whinnied with delight, and arranged herself before the camera
with her chin forward, her arms crossed, her weight on her
heels, acting a man’s pride ; I think nothing in her life had
ever suggested to her that there is a woman’s kind of pride.

She was poor. Dear God, she was poor. She was poor as
the people in Rab. Her sleeveless white serge coat, her linen
blouse, the coarse kerchief she had twisted round her head,
were stained with age. The wool of the embroidery on her
coat was broken so that here and there the pattern was a mere
fuzz. Garments of this sort have a long life. To be in this
state they must have been worn by more than one generation.
She had probably never had new clothes in all her days. This
was not the most important aspect of her. There were others
which were triumphant. It could be seen that she was a wit, a

414 BLACK LAMB AND GREY FALCON

Stoic, a heroine. But for all that it was painful to look at her,
because she was deformed by the slavery of her ancestors as she
might have been by rheumatism. The deep pits round her
eyes and behind her nostrils, the bluish grooves running down
her neck, spoke of an accumulated deprivation, an amassed
[Kjverty, handed down like her ruined clothes from those who
were called rayas, the ransomed ones, the Christian serfs who
had to buy the right to live. To some in Bosnia the East gave,
from some it took away.

Yaitse (Jajce) I

Beyond Travnik the road rose through slashing rain to a
high pass, beset before and behind with violet clouds, rent
and repaired in the same instant by the scissors of lightning.
The open faces of the primroses were pulpy under the storm,
the green bells of the hellebore were flattened against the
rocks. In the valley beyond we ran into a high blue cave of
stillness and sunshine, and came on a tumbledown village,
shabby and muddy and paintless and charming, called Varsi
Vakuf. " Vakuf " is a Turkish word meaning religious
property ; I have never heard anything that made me more
positively anxious not to study Turkish than the news that the
plural of this word is " Evkaf ”. It is called by that name
because the land hereabouts was given by pious Moslems to
provide for the maintenance of mosques and charitable institu-
tions, and some hundreds of the labourers that tilled it lived
in this village. Under the Austro-Hungarian Empire these
properties were specially nursed, and the labourers given
pref^erential treatment. They were, indeed, the only agri-
cultural workers whose position was in any way better under
the Austrians than it had been under the Turks. Nowadays
the property is well looked after by the Moslem Political Party,
but the village has fallen into that state of gentle disorder rather
than actual squalor, which is characteristic of Ottoman remains
in Bosnia.

The violent rains had set the main street awash with mud,
and we saw nobody but an old man with the white twist in
his turban that denotes the Moslem priest, tiptoeing across
the morass with the air of a disgusted cat, to a rickety wooden

BOSNIA

4>S

mosque. He looked agreeable ; but the town was irritating
to the female eye, with its projecting upper storeys where the
rotting latticed harem windows are ready to fall out of their
rotten casements. It is impudent of men to keep women as
luxuries unless they have the power to guarantee them the
framework of luxury. If men ask women to give up for their
sake the life of the market-place they must promise that they
will bring to the harem all that is best in the market-place ;
that, as all intelligent Moslems have admitted, is the only
understanding on which the harem can be anything but a field
of male sexual gluttony and cantankerousness. But if they fail
to keep that ambitious promise, which there was indeed no
obligation to make, they should surrender the system and let
women go back to freedom and get what they can. A harem
window with a hole boarded up and a lattice tied by a rag to its
casement, is a sign of the shabby failure that has broken faith
with others, like a stranded touring company.

After Vakuf we passed through a valley that was like a
Chinese landscape, with woods leaning to one another across
deep vertical abysses ; and suddenly we found ourselves at the
waterfall which is the chief glory of Yaitse. That town stands
on a hill, divided by a deep trench from a wide mountain
covered by forests and villages, and a river rushes down from
the town and leaps a hundred feet into a river that runs along
the trench. The chauffeur and Constantine ran about the
brink uttering cries. All South Slavs regard water as a sacred
substance, and a waterfall is half-way to the incarnation of a
god. My husband and I went a stroll, hobbling over the slippery
stones, to see the smooth lap and the foaming skirts of the
waters from a distance, and when we looked back we saw that
Constantine had taken a seat on a rock : and by the waving
of his little short arms and the rolling of his curly black bullet
head we knew that near him a bird was fluttering over the
falls, exulting in the coolness, in the blows the spray struck on
its almost weightless body, in the challenge that was made to
its wing-courage. From the turn of his plump wrists and the
circles described by his short neck, we knew it beyond a doubt.
His hands and his head told us too when the wind swung out the
fall from the cliff and it floated like a blown scarf, and what
delicious fear was felt by the bird. Constantine is a true poet.
He knows all about things he knows nothing about.

4x6 BLACK LAMB AND GREY FALCON

We heard laughter. On the mountainside beyond the river
three peasant girls were taking a walk, in bright dresses which
showed a trace of Turkish elegance, which recalled that the
word used for “ well-to-do ” in this district means literally
“ velvet-clad ”, and Constantine’s bird-ballet had caught their
eye. They had huddled into a giggling group and watched him
for some minutes, then burst into teasing cries, and waved their
arms and rolled their heads in parody. Then when Constantine
stood up and roared at them in mock rage, they squealed in
mock fear, and fled along the path, across a flowery field
into a glade, and again across a field. In alarm the birds
that had been fluttering through the spray flew out into the void
of the abyss and divided to the right and left. The three girls
took hands and laughed over their shoulders, louder than ever,
with their heads thrown back, and entered a deep wood, and
were not seen again. Constantine slumped forward, his head
on his knees, and seemed to sleep.

When it grew cold we roused him, and walked slowly
towards the town under flowering trees. The word Yaitse
(or Jajce) means either little egg or, in poetry, groin, or
testicle. I am unable to say what sort of poetry. The town
is extravagantly beautiful. It stands on an oval hill that is
like an egg stuck on the plateau above the river, and its houses
and gardens mount over the rounded slope to a gigantic fortress ;
and it has the shining and easy look of a land where there is
enough water. There is a royal look to it, which is natural
enough, for it was the seat of the Bosnian kings, and an
obstinacy about the wholemeal masonry of the city walls and the
fortifications which is also natural enough, for it resisted the
Turks for a painful century and in 1878 met the Austrians with
dogged, suicidal opposition. Now it has a look of well-being,
which is partly a bequest from the colony of wealthy Turkish
merchants who settled here, and partly a sign that, what with
pigs and plums and a bit of carpet-weaving and leather-
working, things here are not going so badly nowadays.

The Austrians tried to direct their tourist traffic here, and
that is why Yaitse owns an immense old-fashioned hotel with a
Tyrolean air. When I saw the high bed with gleaming sheets,
so suggestive of ice-axes and early rising, I would willingly
have lain down and gone to sleep, but already Constantine,
who is never tired, had found a guide. This was a pale and

BOSNIA

417

emaciated lad, probably phthisical, for tuberculosis is the
scourge of this land. All day long one sees peasants sitting on
the ground, even shortly after rain, yet they rarely have rheu-
matism ; but tuberculosis is as murderous as it is in the Western
Isles. It seems to be the stuffy nights in the overcrowded houses
that do it. The lad was the worse off for being a Christian ;
he had not that air of being sustained in his poverty by secret
spiritual funds that is so noticeable in the poverty-stricken
Moslem. Coughing, he led us through the white streets, in
front of a fan of children that stared but never begged, to a
gardenish patch, where steps led down into the ground.

We found ourselves walking through black corridors and
halls, cold with the wet breath of the living rock. Black vaults
soared above us, in hard mystery. From a black throne a
sacrifice had been decreed, on a black altar it had been offered,
in a black sepulchre it had been laid by ; and throne and altar
and sepulchre were marked with black crescent moons and
stars. “ These are the catacombs of the Bogomils,” said the
guide. That I believe is not certain ; they are probably the
funeral crypt of some noble Bosnian family, stripped of its
skeletons by the Turks. But they revealed the imaginative
bent which would find hermetic belief attractive. This sub-
terranean palace came as near as matter could to realising the
fantasy, dear to childhood and never quite forgotten, of a
temple excavated from the ebony night, where priests swathed
and silent, though putatively basso profunda, inducted the neo-
phyte by torchlight, through vast pillared galleries dominated
by monolithic gods, to the inmost and blackest sanctuary,
where by bodiless whisper or by magic rite brightly enacted
against the darkness, The Secret was revealed.

I felt agreeably stimulated. “ This ought to be a setting
for a wonderful play ”, I thought ; but it would not develop
past the image of the pale and powerful Master of Mysteries,
sitting on his black throne and thundering his awful judgment.
I could think of no event that would seem adequate as cause for
pallor extreme enough to equal the blackness of the living rock,
and I was forced to ask myself why, if this Master of Mystery
was so powerful, he had to do his work downstairs. I re-
membered that when Mozart wrote " The Magic Flute ” in
exploitation of our love for the crypto-cavern and the solemn
symbol, he and his librettist had finally to turn their backs on

4i8 black lamb AND GREY FALCON

the unresolved plot and go home whistling with their hands
in their pockets. I remembered, too, that this strand of fancy
had at first been identified with Christianity, but swung loose
when Christianity became respectable and a church was as much
a state building as a mint or a law-court. Then it identified
itself with heresy ; and when religious tolerance had spread over
Europe and heresy became dissent, it adopted political unrest
and revolution as its field. Thus it happened that the secret
societies of Europe, particularly those which had been formed
in the universities, were responsible for ’48. Now 1 was faced
with a material expression of this fantasy, and realised my own
inability to use it as a stepping-stone to any new imaginative
position, I could see how it was that *48 led merely to ’49, and
to ’50, and to all the other flat and doleful years ; and how it
was that Left Wing movements, which are so often tinged with
romanticism, fade away after the initial drama of their seizure
of power.

“ Come," said Constantine, " there are so many things to
be seen in Yaitse, you cannot wait. There are two friends of
mine who run a chemical factory here, you shall meet them
to-morrow, and they have uncovered an altar of Mithras near
here on the hillside, which I think you should see." As we
came out of the crypt we saw that the afternoon had nearly
become evening. There was a grape-bloom on the light, and
the little children who were waiting for us cast thin giants of
shadows on the cobbles. We went on through the lanes till we
found an orchard, opened a gate in the palings, and followed
a path to the shed. Inside it was quite dark, and the guide
gave us candles. We raised them, and the light met the god
of light.

It was the standard sculptured altar of Mithras. A winged
young man, wearing a Phrygian helmet, his cloak blown out
by the wind, sits on the back of a foundering bull, his left knee
on its croup, his right leg stretched down by its dank so that his
booted foot presses down on its hoof. With his left hand he
grips its nostrils and pulls its head back, and with his right he
is plunging a knife into its neck just above the shoulder. Mith-
ras is not an Apollo, but a stocky divine butcher, and his divinity
lies solely in his competence, which outdoes that of ordinary
butchers. This is the supreme moment in his career. He so
causes the earth. From the blood and marrow that ran forth

THE MITHRAIC ALTAR AT YAITSE DURING ITS EXCAVATION

MONASTERY IN THE FRUSHKA GORA

BOSNIA

419

from the bull’s wound was engendered the vine and the wheat,
the seed emitted by him in his agony was illuminated by the
moon and yeasted into the several sorts of animal, while his soul
was headed off by Mithras* dog, who had hunted down his
body, and was brought into the after-world to be guardian god
of the herds, and give his kind the safety he himself had lost.

The bas-relief is enormously impressive. It explains why
this religion exerted such influence that it is often said to have
just barely failed to supplant Christianity. That is an over-
statement. It had no following among the common people, its
shrines are never found save where there were stationed the
soldiers and functionaries of the Roman Empire ; and it gener-
ally excluded women from its worship. But it was the cherished
cult of the official classes, that is to say the only stable and happy
people in the dying state ; and it must have had some of the
dynamic force of Christianity, because it had so much of its
content. The Christians hated it not only because it offered
a formidable rivalry but because this sacrificial killing of the
bull was like a parody of the crucifixion ; and that was not the
only uncomfortable resemblance between the two faiths. Ter-
tullian says that “ the devil, whose work it is to pervert the truth,
invents idolatrous mysteries to imitate the realities of the divine
sacraments. ... If my memory does not fail me he marks his
own soldiers with the sign of Mithras on their foreheads, com-
memorates an offering of bread, introduces a mock resurrection,
and with the sword opens the way to the crown." He was also
annoyed because virginity was practised by certain followers of
Mithras. There is no pleasing some people.

But Mithraism has its own and individual attraction. Power,
which is perhaps the most immediately attractive concept we
know, is its subject matter. Mithras is the Lord of Hosts, the
God of Victory, he who sends down on kings and princes the
radiance that means success. This slaughter of the bull is a
fantasy of the power that never runs to waste, that can convert
defeat itself to an extreme refreshment. Mithras conquers
the bull, which is to say, the power of mind and body con-
quers the power of the body alone. But it is not tolerable
that any power of whatever sort should be wasted, particularly
in the primitive and satisfying image of the bull, so there is
invented a magic that makes him the source of all vegetable
and animal life at a moment which it then becomes trivial to

420 BLACK LAMB AND GREY FALCON

consider as his death. He even destroys death as he dies, for
as the guardian god of the herds he guarantees the continued
existence of his powerful species. Power rushes through this
legend like the waterfall of Yaitse, falling from a high place but
rising victoriously unhurt, to irrigate and give life.

It was so dark that even by candlelight one could see little :
but the best way to see sculpture is not with the eyes but with
the hnger-tips. I mounted on the plinth and ran my hands over
the god and the bull. Strength welled out of the carving. The
grip of the god’s legs on the bull recalled all the pleasure to be
derived from balance, riding and rock-climbing and ski-ing;
the hilt of the dagger all but tingled, the bull's throat was tense
with the emerging life. My hands passed on from the central
tableau. Right and left were the torch-bearers, one holding his
torch uplifted, as symbol of dawn and spring and birth, the
other letting it droop, as symbol of dusk and winter and death.
How did this faith alter the morning ? How did it improve the
evening ? What explanation of birth could it furnish, what
mitigation of death ? My finger-tips could not find the answer.

The central tableau showed that power was glorious and
the cause of all ; but all must be caused by power, for power is
the name given to what causes. That is to say, the central tableau
proves that x'^x — x. There are no other terms involved which
can be added or subtracted or multiplied. The imagination came
to a dead stop, as it had done in the crypt which we had just
left. I remembered that there had been tacked on to the
Asiatic elements in Mithraism a system something like Free-
masonry, which put the faithful through initiatory ceremonies
and made them in succession Ravens, Occults, Soldiers, Lions,
Persians, Runners of the Sun, and Fathers. Each rank had its
sacred mask, legacy from the tradition of more primitive cults.
But when one had put on one’s Lion’s Head and walked about
in procession, what did one do ? One went home. So Mithra-
ism waned, defended by martyrs who died as nobly as any
Christians, and Christianity triumphed, by virtue of its com-
plexity, which gives the imagination unlimited material.

We went through the fruit trees, their blossom rosy now
with evening, and climbed to the heights of the town, between
high houses with steep tiled roofs, new churches and old mosques.
Women, often veiled, leaned over balconies, out of suddenly
opened casements ; little dogs, harlequined with the indications

BOSNIA

4**

of a dozen breeds, ran out of neat little gardens and bade us
draw and deliver. We came at last to the fortress that lifts a
broad breast of wall and two hunched shoulders of strong towers
on the summit of the hill. This was built by the Bosnian kings,
who were warmed by a reflection of Byzantine culture, and it was
occupied for centuries by the Turks ; but, with the irrelevance
scenery sometimes displays, its interior is a perfect expresion
of French romanticism. As we walked round the broad turfed
battlements we looked on rough mountains that a fading scarlet
and gold sunset clothed with a purple heather made of light ;
and from the town below came the virile and stoical cries of
Slav children. But within the enceinte all was black and white
and grey, grace and melancholy.

It contained a deeply sunken park, such as might have sur-
rounded a chateau in France. In it there were several stone
buildings fallen into stately disrepair in the manner of the ruins
in a Hubert-Robert picture ; there was a long cypress avenue,
appropriate for the parting of lovers, divided either by the
knowledge that one or both must die of a decline, or by the
appearance of the ghost of a nun ; and there were lawns on
which ballet-girls in tarlatan should have been dancing to the
music of Chopin, It evoked all sorts of emotion based on
absence. As the colour faded from the sky, and it became a pale
vault of crystal set with stars blurred with brightness as by tears,
and the woods lay dark as mourning on the grey mountains, it
was as if the park beneath had carried its point and imposed its
style on its surroundings. The moon was high and shed on these
lawns and cypresses and ruins that white bloom, that finer frost,
that comes before the moonlight. We felt an aching tenderness,
which was a kind of contentment ; Constantine began to speak
of the days when he was a student under Bergson, as he always
did when he was deeply moved.

But the mind pricked on, as in the black crypt and before
the Mithraic altar, to use this scene as a point of departure for
the imagination. And again I found no journey could be made.
A ruin is ruined, nothing of major importance can be housed in
it. If the two lovers were consumed by a fatal illness, that was
the end of them. If the ghost of a nun appeared she would
perhaps reveal a secret, such as the position of the grave of her
child, which would be rendered completely unimportant by the
fact that she was a ghost, since the existence of an after-life

VOL. I 2 E

422 BLACK LAMB AND GRBY FALCON

would make everything in this life of trifling importance ; or
she would disappear, which would leave matters precisely as
they had been. The dancers would sometime have to stop
dancing, to retreat on their slowly shuddering points into the
shadow of the cypresses, until the undulating farewells of their
arms were no longer moonlit. None of the component parts of
this lovely vision admitted of development. Better men than I
am had felt it. The romantics are always hard put to it to begin
their stories, to find a reason for the solitude and woe of their
characters ; that is why so often they introduce the motive of
incest, a crime only really popular among the feeble-minded,
and open to the objection that after a few generations the race
would die of boredom, each family being restricted to a single
hereditary hearth. And the romantics can never finish their
stories ; they go bankrupt and put the plot in the hands of
death, the receiver, who winds it up with a compulsory funeral.

We went back to a hotel, pausing to blink through the night
at a kind of shop window in a church, a glass coffin let into the
wall, where there lies the last Bosnian king, a usurper and per-
secutor,yet honoured because he was a Slav ruler and not aTurk.
For half an hour 1 lay on the steep and shining bed in my room,
and then came down to eat the largest dinner I have eaten since
I was a little girl. There was chicken soup, and a huge bowl of
little crimson crayfish, and very good trout, and a pile of palat-
schinken, pancakes stuffed with jam like those at Split which the
waiter had tried to make me lay up against the hungers of the
night, and some excellent Dalmatian wine. I said to Constantine
something of what I had felt at the sights of Yaitse, and he
answered : " Yes, it is strange that there are sensations quite
delightful which are nevertheless not stimuli : that there are
spectacles which make us shiver with pleasure of a quite refined
and intricate sort and yet do not open any avenue along which
our minds, which are like old soldiers, and like to march be-
cause that is their business, can travel. And listen, I will tell
you, it is very sad, for we need more avenues. Since some of
the avenues that our minds can march down very happily are
bad places for us to go.

‘‘ Let me tell you a story of Yaitse. This was a great place to
the Turks. For them it was the key to Central Europe, and so
for many years they would have it. For seven years it was
defended by a Bosnian general, Peter Keglevitch, and at last he

BOSNIA

4*3

came to the end. He knew that if there was another attack he
could not meet it. Just then he heard that the Turkish troops
had left their camp and were massing in one of the ravines to
make a surprise sally on the fortress with ladders. So he sent a
spy over to talk with the Turks and tell them that he had seen
they had gone from their camp, and had been very glad, and
had told all his soldiers, ' Now you may laugh and be glad, for
the enemy has gone far away, and you may sing and drink and
sleep, and to-morrow, which is St. George’s Day, your women
and girls may go out as usual to the mountains in the morning
according to our custom and wash their faces in the dew and
dance and sing.’ But the Turks were doubtful, and they lay in
wait at dawn, and they saw all the women and girls of Yaitse
come out of their houses in their most beautiful clothes, and go
down the steep streets to the lawns and terraces beyond the
river, yes, where those most impudent ones were this afternoon.
There they washed their dear little faces in the dew, and then
some struck the strings of the gusla, and others sang, and others
joined their hands and danced the kolo. Poor little ones, their
fingers must have been very cold, and I do not know if they
sang very well, for each of them had a knife hidden in her bosom,
to use if her plan miscarried.

“ Then, when the Turks heard them singing and saw them
dancing they thought that what the spy had said must be true,
and the fortress would be like a ripe fruit in their hands. But
since they were always like wolves for women, they left their
ladders and they ran down to rape the poor little ones before
they started looting and killing in the town. When they were in
the woodlands and marshes down by the river the Christians rose
from their ambush and destroyed them. And the little ones
who had been so brave went back to the city they had saved, and
for a few more years they were not slaves.

“ Now, that is a story that will send the mind marching on,
particularly if it belongs to a good and simple man or woman.
Peter Keglevitch was a cunning man, and it is right to be cunning,
that the Turks and such evil ones may be destroyed. The little
ones were very brave, and to save their city and their faith they
risked all ; and it is right to be brave, because there is always
evil. And it is all so beautiful ; for the little ones were lovely
as they sang and danced, and they were trusted by their Slav
men, so that there must have been an honourable love between

BLACK LAMB AND GREY FALCON

4*4

them, and the desire of the Turks makes us think of other things
of which we would be ashamed and which are nevertheless very
exciting and agreeable. And St. George’s Day is a most beauti-
ful feast, and our mountains are very beautiful, and Yaitse is
the most beautiful town. And so a man can give himself great
pleasure in telling himself that story, and he can imagine all sorts
of like happenings, with himself as Peter Keglevitch, with all the
loveliest little ones being brave for his sake, and all his enemies
lying dead in the marshes, with water over the face ; and on
that he can build up a philosophy which is very simple but is a
real thing ; it makes a man’s life mean more than it did before
he held it. Now, will you tell me what in peace is so easy for a
simple man to think about as this scene of war 7 So do not
despise my people when they cannot settle down to freedom,
when they are like those people on the road of whom I said to
you, ‘ They think all the time they must die for Yugoslavia,
and they cannot understand why we do not ask them to do that
but another thing, that they should live and be happy ’. You
have seen that all sorts of avenues our artists and thinkers have
started lead nowhere at all, are not avenues but clumps of trees
where it is pleasant to rest a minute or two in the heat of the day,
groves into which one can go, but out of which one must come.
You will find that we Serbs are not so. We are simpler, and
we have not had so many artists and thinkers, but we have
something of our own to think about, which is war, but a little
more than war, for it is noble, which war need not necessarily
be. And from it our minds can go on many adventures. But
you must go to bed now, you look tired.”

Yaitse {jtgee) II

“ You must wake up at once,” said my husband. But it was
not next morning. The room was flooded with moonlight, and
my watch told me that I had been in bed only half an hour.
" Get up and dress,” my husband urged me, '* there is a female
dentist downstairs.” In his hand I noticed he held a glass of
plum brandy. “ She has a voice like running water,” he con-
tinued, “ and she says she will sing us the Bosnian songs, which
in this region are particularly beautiful.” “ What is all this
about ? ” I asked coldly. “ She is the sister of Chabrinovitch,

BOSNIA 425

the boy who made the first attempt on Franz Ferdinand’s life,
and then threw himself into the river. She is the wife of the
medical officer here and practises herself. Somebody in Sara-
jevo wrote and told her we were coming. Come down quickly.
I must go back to her, Constantine is telephoning to his bureau
in Belgrade, and she is all alone.”

He left me with such an air of extreme punctiliousness that I
was not surprised when I came downstairs to find a very attrac-
tive woman. She was not young, she was not to any pyro-
technic degree beautiful, but she was an enchanting blend of
robustness and sensitiveness. She possessed the usual founda-
tion of Slav beauty, lovely head bones. Her skin was bright,
her eyes answered for her before her lips had time, and she had
one of those liquid and speeding voices that will never age ;
when she is eighty it will sound as if she were an unfatigued and
hopeful girl. In pretty German she said that she had come to
take us to her house, where we could drink coffee and meet her
hu.sband, and so we went out into the moonlit town.

She was a little shy of us, since Constantine was still tele-
phoning and we had to go alone. Like a foal she ran ahead, on
the excuse that she knew the way ; but kindness drew her back
as we were going up an alley. “ You would like to see,” she said,
and pointed to a small window in a white wall. We had already
remarked a sound of chanting, and we found that we were
looking into a mosque, where about a hundred Moslems were
attending their evening rite. Through the dim light we could
see their arms stretch up in aspiration, and then whack down
till their whole bodies were bowed and their foreheads touched
the floor in an obeisance that was controlled and military, that
had no tinge of private emotion about it. The sound of their
■worship twanged like a bow. They rose again, relaxed, and we
thought the prayer must be over ; but again they strained up
tautly, and again they beat the floor. It looked as if it were
healthy and invigorating to perform, like good physical jerks,
which, indeed, the Moslem rite incorporates to a greater degree
than any other liturgy of the great religions. Five times during
the day a Moslem must say prayer, and during these prayers
he must throw up his arms and then get down to the ground
anything from seven to thirteen times. As the average man likes
taking physical exercise but has to be forced into it by some
external power, this routine probably accounts for part of the

426 BLACK LAMB AND GREY FALCON

popularity of Islam. We watched till a fezzed head turned toward
us. It was strange to eavesdrop on a performance so firmly
based on self-confidence of success and solidarity with the big
battalion, and feel diffident, not because one was on the side of
failure and the beaten battalion, but because the final issue of
the battle had been not as was expected. We went on to an
apartment house that stood several storeys high in the shadow
of the fortress, and were taken into a home that recorded a
triumph, which perhaps belonged truly to yesterday, but had
certainly not been completely annulled by to-day.

It was a room that could be found anywhere in Europe. It
had light distempered walls and a polished floor laid with simple
rugs ; it was hung with pictures in the modern style, bright with
strong colours ; the furniture was of good wood, squarely cut
by living hands ; there was a bowl of fruit on the sideboard ;
there were many books on the shelves and tables, by such writers
as Shaw and Wells, Aldous Huxley and Ernest Hemingway,
Thomas Mann and Romain Holland and Gorky. This sort of
room means the same sort of thing wherever it is, in London
or Paris, Madrid or Vienna, Oslo or Florence. It implies a need
(hat has been much blown upon since the last war ended and
reaction got its chance ; but it certifies that its owners possess
honourable attributes. They have a passion for cleanliness, a
strong sense of duty, a tenderness for little children that counter-
balances the threat made to young life by the growth of the town,
a distaste for violence, a courageous readiness to criticise authority
if it is abusing its function. Such a room implies, of course,
certain faults in its owners. They are apt to be doctrinaire, to
believe that life is far simpler than it is, and that it can be
immediately reduced to order by the application of certain
liberal principles, which assume that man is really amenable to
reason, even in matters relating to sex and race. They are also
inclined to be sceptical about the past and credulous towards
the present ; they will believe any fool who tells them to fill
themselves with some contorted form of cereal, and despise the
ancient word that recommends wine and flesh. These are how-
ever slight faults, easily corrected by experience, compared to
the dirt and irresponsibility, violence and carelessness towards
children, cowardice and slavishness, on which these people
wage war.

Only the malign bigot hates such rooms. Even those who

BOSNIA

4*7

believe that there is more in life than such people grant, must
admit that these rooms are worthy temples to subsidiary gods.
There are those who sourly remark that Bolshevism was made
in such rooms. It is not true. The Russian exiles who were
responsible for that sat on unmade beds in flats as untidy as
Versailles or any medieval castle. They were the powerful
people who never tidy up, who only happened for the moment
to be out of power. But those who live in these swept and
garnished rooms wish only to serve. In the hereafter they shall
be saved when all the rest of us are damned.

It could be seen that the doctor husband was of salvation,
like his wife : his handsome face spoke of kindliness, discipline
and hope. They gave us coffee, and we told them of the beauty
of our journey, and they told us how homesick they had been
when they had to leave Bosnia to take their training at the
University in Belgrade, and how happy they had been to come
back and practise here. They spoke of their work with a stern-
ness which seemed strange in people who are in their own country,
which we hear only from colonists and missionaries in Africa
or Asia. But they were in the position of colonists and mission-
aries, because Austria left Bosnians in the position of Africans
or Asiatics. “ They did nothing for us,” said the doctor,
“ nothing, in all the thirty-six years they were here. You can
test it. Look for the buildings they left behind them. .You will
find a great many barracks, some tourist hotels, and a few —
pitifully few — schools. No hospitals. No reservoirs. No
houses for the people.” They told us that when they had left
Bosnia after the war to study in Serbia they had been astonished
at the superior lot of the Serbian peasant. His country had been
sacked and invaded, but nevertheless he was better fed and
better clad than his Bosnian brother. " Liberation meant to
us,” said the dentist, “ release from being robbed." I thought
grimly of the many books written by English travellers between
1805 and 1914 which stoutly maintained that the Bosnians and
Herzegovinians were so much better off, first under Turkey and
then under Austria, than the free Serbs. It would be pleasant
if this could be proved quite unconnected with the circumstance
that the Turks and the Austrians knew how to entertain a
Western visitor, while the free Serbs lacked the money and
experience.

At length Constantine came in, and they greeted him

428 BLACK LAMB AND GREY FALCON

affectionately. After we had drunk the ceremonial round of
coffee that was brought in for him, he spoke to the dentist in
Serb and she turned to us with a face suddenly flushed, the
eyes and mouth happy and desperate, as in a memory of a love-
affair that had been unfortunate but glorious. “ Constantine
says I am to tell you about my brother," she said. " But the
story is so long, and it is so difficult for foreigners to realise.
This will help you to understand some of it.” She took from
the book-case an album of photographs of the attentat that had
been sent to her after the war by the Chief of Police at Sarajevo,
and spread it out before us, and then walked up and down,
her hands over her face, quivering in that lovely nervousness
which, save when her sense of duty was organising her, governed
her being. Most of the photographs we had seen before ; they
showed the streets of Sarajevo, with the two poor stuffed and
swollen victims being pushed on to their deaths, and the frail
and maladroit assassins laying hold of the lightning for one
minute, and then falling into the power of the people in the
streets, who on this day looked so much more robust and
autonomous than either the victims or the assassins that they
might have belonged to a different race. But there were in
addition some ghastly pictures of the terror that followed the
assassination, when, long before any enquiry into the crime,
hundreds of Bosnian peasants who had barely heard of it were
put to death. There were some particularly ghastly pictures of
men who had never known anything but injustice, misgovern-
ment by the Turks and Austrians, poverty, and this undeserved
death, and were now saying in grim pride with their wry
necks and stretched bodies, " Nevertheless I am I ”. There
were also pictures of some peasant women who hung from the
gallows-tree rigid as saints on icons among their many skirts.
There were several photographs of the fields round the barracks
at various towns where these mass-executions took place, each
showing the summer day thronged as if there were a garden-
party going on, with the difference that every single face was
marked with the extremity of agony or brutality. The interest
and strangeness of the pictures was so great that I swung loose
from what I was and for a moment looked about me, lost as one
is sometimes when one wakes in a train or in an unfamiliar
hotel ; it might have been that we were all dead and that I was
looking at some records of the death-struggle of our race.

BOSNIA

429

Coining close to me, the dentist cried, in that voice which
was delicious even when what she said was acutely painful,
“ But we have no record of the worst part, of what happened
to him in prison. That should be known, for if such things
happen it is not right that they should not be known. But it is
dreadful to me to wonder what he did suffer, for you cannot
think how delicate and fragile he was, my little brother. He
was so — fine. If it had not been for the oppression never
would he have done anything violent. So 'it was easy for them
to kill him in prison.” I asked, “ Is it true, what they say, that
he was bound to die, because before he went into prison he had
tuberculosis ? ” “ No, no, no,” she protested, “ never did he

have anything of the sort before they got hold of him, never ! ”
Then, correcting her impulsiveness by a lovely effort of self-
discipline, she explained, ” I have asked myself again and
again, in the light of my medical training, if he suffered from
anything of the sort, and quite honestly I do not think so, I
cannot remember any definite s)rmptoms at all. He was not
robust, and he had a tendency to catarrh and bronchitis, but
really there was nothing more than that. But it is the habit
of our people to say, when they see a boy or girl who is thin
and weakly, ' He looks consumptive ’, and the Austrians took
advantage of that to excuse themselves.”

It has always interested me to know what happens after the
great moments in history to the women associated by natural ties
to the actors. I would like to know what St. Monica had to do
after her son St. Augustine heard the child in the garden say,
“ Tolle lege, tolle lege ”, and was converted to Christianity ; how
she treated with the family of the little heiress whom St. Augus-
tine was then obliged to jilt, how she dismissed the concubine with
whom he had been passing the difficult time of his engagement,
how she gave up the lease of the house in Milan. These are
the things you are never told. I said to the dentist, “ Tell me
what happened to you and your mother after the attentat."
She said, “You cannot think how terrible it was for my poor
mother. She knew nothing of politics, she had been married
when she was a young girl, she had had many children, my
father was a very stern man who would hardly let her speak
and never spoke to her save to order her and scold her, she was
quite dazed. Then suddenly this happened ! Her eldest child
tried to kill the Archduke and his wife — apart from anything

430 BLACK LAMB AND GREY FALCON

else, she felt it was too grand for us, it could not happen. Then,
that same evening, they came and arrested my father, and it
was as if the end of the world had come, she had not known
what it was to be without a man, without her father or her
husband. I was no use to her. I was a girl, and indeed I was
only fifteen. She was like a terrified animal. But then the
next morning a neighbour climbed into her back garden and
said, ‘ Come, you must escape, a mob is coming to kill you,’
and she and I had to take the five children that were younger
than me and my brother, and get them down the back garden
and out through another house into the street beyond, where'
another friend sheltered us. As we got clear we heard the
mob wrecking our home. Then she was very brave. But for
long she simply could not understand what had happened.
Nothing in her life had prepared her for it.

“ Later on, before she died, she saw that my brother had
been very brave and had done something that history demanded,
but at first it was only a disgrace and a disaster. You see, for
long she was stunned by the terrible things that happened to us.'
We were taken with many other Bosnians to an internment
camp in Hungary, and she and I had to earn money by working
all day as laundresses, but even so my little brother and sisters
were always hungry, and so were we, and many people died all
round us. It was like Hell, and we grieved for my poor brother
Nedyelyko, for we did not know what had happened to him, and
even now, beyond the fact that he is dead, we do not know.
Then at the end of the war it was still terrible, for one day they
simply came to us and turned us loose, drove us out of the
camp with no money and nowhere to go, and no clear idea of
what had happened, and we were so weak and foolish and
confused with suffering. That was a nightmare. Then, when
we had found my father, we settled down again and all lived
together in the same house. But it was not for long ; she was a
dying woman, and she lived only a year or two. I will show
you a photo that we had taken of her on her deathbed only a
few days before she died.”

The dentist rose to fetch it, and Constantine said to me,
prepared to hate me if I was unsympathetic, “ It is the habit of
our people to take photographs of their beloveds not only at
weddings and at christenings, but in death too, we do not reject
them in their pain.” It marked a real division between our

BOSNIA

431

kinds. I could not imagine any English person I knew having
had this photograph taken, or preserving it if by chance it had
been taken, or showing it to a stranger. The mother’s face was
propped up against pillows, emaciated and twisted by her
disease, which I imagine must have been cancer, like the petal
of a flower that is about to die ; her eyes reviewed her life and
these circumstances that were bringing it to an end, and were
amazed by them. The children’s faces, pressing in about her
sharp shoulders and her shrunken bosom, mirrored on their
health the image of their mother’s disease and were amazed
by her amazement. But no part of their grief was being re-
jected by them, it was running through them in a powerful
tide, it was adding to their power. Constantine need not have
been alarmed, I felt this difference between his people and mine
as a proof of our inferiority. To be afraid of sorrow is to be
afraid of joy also ; since we do not take photographs of our
deathbeds, it is hardly worth the trouble to take photographs
of our weddings and christenings. “ Think of it,” said the
dentist, “ there is such a sad and funny thing I remember about
that photograph ! We sent for the photographer and gathered
round the bed ; and afterwards we found that my father was
hurt because we had not told him that the photographer was
coming and he could not be included in the picture. It did not
occur to him that to us he was the instrument of her martyrdom,
that we would have thought it as odd to have him in a picture
of her agony as it would be for the wife of a shepherd who has
been fatally mauled by a wolf to include the animal in a last
photograph of him. It showed how innocent he was in his
severity, how it was all part of a role he had chosen and stuck
to because he had not the sensitiveness to realise the conse-
quences.”

“ This is what he was like,” said the doctor, who had been
turning over the portfolio out of which his wife had taken her
mother’s picture. He handed us a photograph of a man in
peasant costume, with a face as completely “ made-up ” by an
aggressive expression as Mussolini’s, standing in a defiant pose
in front of some banners bearing Serbian inscriptions of a
patriotic nature. " He was a very stern Bosnian patriotic man,”
said Constantine ; “ see, these are the banners of his secret
nationalist society. Es musste mit ihm immer trotzen sein,
immer trotsen.” The dentist picked it up, looked at it for a

BLACK LAMB AND GREY FALCON

43*

minute as intently as if she had never seen it before, shook her
head and put it down. “ In the house, never a gentle word,”
she said. She buried her face in her hands, but began to laugh.
" I can think of things that seemed terrible to me at the time,
but now they seem funny. There was the time when 1 was
chosen to recite for my class at the school prize-giving.”
“ Yes,” said the doctor, " tell them that, it always makes me
laugh ! ” " Yes, please do,” we said.

“ It was when we still lived at Trebinye,” said the dentist,
“ and already my brother and I were very ambitious, we meant
to be educated, so I worked very hard, and I was top of my
class. Therefore I was chosen to say a recitation at the prize-
giving, which was a great affair, all the functionaries came to
it and even some of the officers and their wives, to say nothing
of all the townspeople. But, of course, I was miserable when I
heard that I was chosen, because I knew that all the other little
girls who were chosen to recite for their class would have pretty
new dresses and light shoes and stockings for the occasion, and
I knew I would have nothing. We had nothing, none of us,
never. We had only to ask for something and Father immedi-
ately felt that made it a duty to refuse it, lest we became spoilt
and self-indulgent. It was no good asking our mother to speak
for us. That would make it doubly certain we should not get
what we wanted, he would then want to prove that he was
master in his own house.

“ But I began to see he was proud I had been chosen. I
found out that he was taking about with him the local news-
paper in which the choice of pupils was announced and showing
it to his friends. So very, very timidly I approached him. I
was not honest. Usually I was honest with him, however much
he beat me. But this time — ah, I wanted so much a little soft,
fine dress ! So I went and I told him how I wanted a new dress
and new shoes, and I thought I should have them, because the
Austrians and Hungarians would be there and they would sneer
at me as a Serb, if I was in my old clothes. And that impressed
him. ‘ Yes,’ he said, ‘ I see it, you must have a new dress, and
new shoes, and new stockings. It must be done.’ I shall never
forget how my heart leaped up when I heard him say this.

" But I had not reckoned it was still my father who said I
could have these things, and therefore it followed that they could
not possibly be the things which I wanted and which would give

BOSNIA

433

me pleasure. The poor dear man began to think of these shoes
and these stockings and this dress as expressions of his IVeit-
ansckammg. He became very smiling and mysterious, he
treated me as if he were about to confer some benefit on me
which I was not old enough to understand as yet, but which
would astonish me when I came to full knowledge of it. Then
at last a day came, just before the prize-giving, when he took
me out to see what he had been preparing for me. We went
to a bootmaker who had already made for me a pair of boots,
immensely large for me so that I should not grow out of them,
made so strongly that if I had walked through a flood I should
have come out with dry feet, cut out of leather so tough and
thick that it might have been from an elephant or a rhinoceros.
For weeks he had been enquiring which cobbler in Trebinye
made the stoutest footwear, used the most invincible leather.
I put them on, saying in my heart, ‘ This cannot be true.’

" Then he took me to a tailor who tried on me a dress that
was as incredibly horrible as my boots. For weeks the poor
man had been going about the drapers’ shops, in search of
material that was strongest, that would never wear out. He
had found out something with which one could build a battle-
ship, I cannot tell you what it was like. It hardly went into
folds. This had been made into a dress for me by a tailor, who
had been chosen because he was an old man who made no
concessions to modern taste and cut clothes as the people in the
hill villages wore them, more like the cloths you put on horses
and cattle. By the instructions of my father he had made my
dress far too big for me, so that I should not grow out of it for
years, and it even had deep hems, that felt like planks, so that
the skirt would be long enough for me when I was a grown
woman. It had even great insets in the bodice, for the days
when my bosom should develop, that stuck out like capes.

“ I cannot tell you what I felt like as I had this horror tried
on me. But it was only a day or two before the prize-giving ;
and if there had been weeks and months before it happened, I
still could have done nothing. For never had I seen my father
in such a good humour, and this terrified me. I felt that inter-
ference in this state would lead to something so horrible that
it could not be faced. My brother was very kind to me about it
and I wept in his arms, but my mother was no use to me,
because she was so dazed by my father, she said nothing but

434 BLACK LAMB AND GREY FALCON

* Hush, hush, you must not anger him ! ’ So on the day of the
prize-giving I crept into my school weeping. All my teachers
and my school-fellows were very kind to me ; they understood
at once, for my father was well known for his severity. But the
time came for me to speak my recitation, and then I had to stump
on the platform in these horrible new boots that would have
been suitable for a peasant working in one of our flooded
valleys. I was scarlet, and with reason, for I must have been
the most ridiculous sight in the world, less like a little girl than
a fortress. But I stood there, and it seemed to me that this was
just another battle in the endless war that I would have to carry
on with my father all my life if I wanted to do anything, so I
began my recitation as well as I could.

" I believe the audience were very kind. But I really knew
nothing of what was happening, for I was caught up into an
extraordinary state. I felt as if my mind was gagged, as if
there was a bar preventing my feelings flowing in the natural
direction, which was of course, for a child in such a situation,
hatred. What was holding me back was the sight of my father
in the audience. He was sitting far back, of course, because
naturally as a patriotic Serb he would not sit in front where the
Austrian and Hungarian functionaries would sit, but he sat in
the front of the seats where the townspeople were, because he
was much respected. So I could see him distinctly, and I
could see that his face was alight as I had never seen it before,
with a sense that at last, just for once in his troubled life, every-
thing was going well, his daughter had wanted something
sensible, and he had granted her desire, and added more to it,
so that from then on he might be sure of getting more of that
gratitude and obedience he craved. I could not love him, but
I could not hate him. Oh, the ptoor dear, the poor dear ! "

She burst into distressed and loving laughter ; and her
fingers, as if without her own knowledge, turned over the
photograph of her mother, laying it with its face down, as if
to protect the dead woman from the ancient enemy whose
personality was being evoked by these memories. “ My father
had so many funny ways,” she went on. " You have perhaps
noticed how greatly our people, however poor they are, love to
be photographed. It was so with him also. Whenever things
seemed to be going well he wanted to take us all to the photo-
grapher’s and be photographed in the midst of his children.

BOSNIA

435

But then when he quarrelled with any of us he would go round
the house cutting our photographs out of the groups. But he
would never destroy them ; perhaps he was too much of a
peasant, with primitive ideas of magic, and to burn the images
of his children or to throw them into a waste-paper basket
would have seemed too much like killing them. He kept them
in a box, and when he took us back into favour he would paste
them back into the group, so that some of our photographs
presented a most extraordinary appearance. I would see one
day that my little sister had gone, and then she would be back,
and then she would be pasted in again — oh dear, oh dear, the
poor man I "

Again she laughed into her hands ; and again her husband
said, a smile on his sane and handsome face, " It was extra-
ordinary how it had never occurred to him that family life
might be conducted agreeably. Once in Belgrade, long after
the war, he came in and found me sitting in the cafe we fre-
quented, and he asked me where my wife was. I said, ‘ I had
an appointment to meet her here at six and she has not come
yet.’ He said, ‘ But it is already half-past. To-night you must
box her ears for this.’ Then I said, ‘ But I married your
daughter precisely because I know that she would never keep
me waiting except for a very good reason, and in any case I
am quite happy sitting here reading my papers and drinking
my coffee, and furthermore I do not like striking women,
particularly when I love them. So why should I give your
daughter a box on the ears ? ' That horrified him. If I had
said something really nasty, something really cruel and base,
I could not have upset him more. He felt 1 was striking at the
foundations of society.”

“ Yet, do you know,” said the dentist, " in his last years he
accepted everything. He used to talk of my whole life, of my
profession, and even of my marriage as if it were something for
which he had worked and planned.” " Yes, indeed,” said the
doctor, " some months before he died we went out and had a
meal alone together as my wife was away, and he said to me,

‘ Well, you know you have reason to thank me. I have brought
my daughter up so that she is a good sensible girl, not just
interested in foolishness as so many women are, and now you
have a wife with a professional standing you can be proud of,
whom you can treat as an equal.’ " “ Now what do you think

436 BLACK LAMB AND GREY FALCON

of that ? " said the dentist happily. But her face changed.
She held up her forefinger. “ Is not that one of my little ones ? "
“ Yes,” said the doctor, " I believe I heard a cry a minute ago,
but I was not sure.” “ You might have told me,” said the dentist,
in a tone that was a little sister to reproach. " Would you
care to see our babies ? ” she asked me, and as we went along
the passage she explained to me, “ They are not really our babies.
My sister, the very lovely one who has her head against my
mother’s shoulder in that photograph I showed you, married
and had four children, and recently died. So, as her husband has
to live in the town and has to work very, very hard, we have
adopted them.”

The children were lying in two beds in a large room, with
their four bright heads pointing to the four quarters of the
compass. The little one had her feet right up on the pillow and
her head down on her sister’s stomach. They stirred and
fretted a little as the dentist turned on the light, but they had
the more than animal, the almost vegetable serenity, of well-
kept children, which Tennyson described when he wrote of
" babes like tumbled fruit in grass ”. As the dentist put them
right way up and tucked them in, she laughed ; and she said,
after she put out the light and we were tiptoeing along the
passage, “ It is such a joke, you know, to have a ready-made
family like this. To have the four children, that is grave and
wonderful, but to have all of a sudden four little toothbrushes,
and four little pairs of bedroom slippers and four little dressing-
gowns, it is all like a fairy-story.” She came back into the
living-room much more placid than when she had left it. “ Now
you will hear some Bosnian songs,” she said, her voice soaring
as if it were glad that her mind were giving it liberty to sing.

Yaitse {Jajce) III

When I awoke and saw the sun a pale-green blaze in the
tree-tops below our windows, my husband was already awake
and pensive, lying with his knees up and his hands clasped
behind his head. “ That was interesting last night,” he said.
“ She loved her brother, but still to her the important person
was the brow-beating father. She had to talk of him because
he seemed to her the prime cause of everything in the house,.

BOSNIA

437

and even the Sarajevo attentat seemed to her simply a con-
sequence of him.” “ I remember there is an odd passage in the
trial which shows that her brother was of the same opinion.
Here, pass it, it is lying on the chair.” I saw, for we had taken
with us Mousset’s French translation of the court proceedings.
“ Yes,” I said, “ it is right at the end. The father makes a few
dreary contentious appearances in the evidence of other people,
bullying, raging, having his son shut up in the police station
because he had offended a pro-Austrian servant in their house
and had refused to apologise, and so on. Then at the end they
read a deposition made by the father, notably certain passages
significant as regarding the father’s opinion of the son. He
complained of his children’s ingratitude, and he expressed the
hope that they in their turn might be treated in the same way
by their own children.” I thought of the plump children I
had seen the night before, deep in their contented sleep in the
airy bedroom, and shuddered on behalf of the dead. “ The
president of the court asked Chabrinovitch, ‘ Do you see what
an ungrateful son you are ? ’ and Chabrinovitch made rather
an astonishing answer. He said, ‘ I do not wish to accuse my
father, but if I had been better brought up, I would not be
seated on this bench.’ ” “ It was an odd thing for a man to
say whose case it was that, granted the annexation of Bosnia,
it was inevitable that he and his friends should murder the
Archduke. It is the fashion now to sneer at Freud, but nobody
else could have predicted that in the mind of Chabrinovitch his
revolt against his father and his revolt against the representative
of the Hapsburgs would seem one and the same, so that when a
question was put to him in court that associated the two revolts,
he answered not with the reason of an adult, but with the excuse
of a defiant child. How exactly this bears out the psycho-
analytic theory that they who attack the heads of states are not
acting as a result of impersonal political theory so much as
out of the desire to resolve emotional disturbances set up by
childish resentment against their parents ! ”

" But wait a minute, wait a minute,” said my husband. “ I
have just thought of something very curious. It has just
occurred to me, does not Seton- Watson say in his book Sarajevo
that Chabrinovitch was the son of a Bosnian Serb who was a
spy in the service of the Austro-Hungarian Government ? ”
“ Why, so he did I ” I exclaimed, " And now I come to think

438 BLACK LAMB AND GREY FALCON

of it, Stephen Graham says so, too, in St. Vitus’ Day.” “ This
is most extraordinary,” said my husband, “ for Seton-Watson
is never wrong, he is in himself a standard for Greenwich time.”
” And Stephen Graham may slip now and then, but in all essential
matters he is in his own vague way precise,” I said. “ Yet all
the same this cannot be true," said my husband ; “ this girl
was talking under the influence of a memory so intense that it
was acting on her like a hypnotic drug, 1 do not think she could
have lied even if she had wanted to do so. And she never
mentioned it ; on the contrary she mentioned several things
that were inconsistent with it, and she showed us that photo-
graph of her father standing among the banners of a Serb
patriotic society, which if he were a police spy would be a piece
of Judas treachery such as the sister of Chabrinovitch could
not bear to keep in her home, much less show to strangers.”

“ No, indeed,” I said, “ I do not believe that if she had
known him to be a police spy, she would have mentioned him
to us. But there’s something else than that. Chabrinovitch
was a youth without reticence, and in the court at Sarajevo he
did not care what he said against the Government. If his
father had been a Government agent I believe he would have
denounced him to the world, just as a young Communist would
have denounced his father as a counter-revolutionary. Yet
never once in all the pages of Chabrinovitch’s evidence, and in
any of the countless comments he made on the evidence of other
witnesses, did he say, ‘ My father was a traitor to the Slav
cause ! ’ He says that he complained that his father hoisted
both the Serbian and Austrian flags on his house, but that was
not an individual act on the part of his father, it was a matter of
conforming to a police regulation, which we know most people
in Sarajevo obeyed. But there is no other act of his father’s
that is denounced by Chabrinovitch.” ” Could they perhaps
not have known ? ” proceeded my husband. " The dentist at
least must have considered the question," I said, " for if Seton-
'Watson and Stephen Graham spread this story it must be
because they have heard it on good authority and from several
sources. It must have come before her notice some time.” " It
is a mystery," said my husband ; " but let us get up, once we
get downstairs we will find Constantine and probably he will
be able to clear up the mystery.”

We found Constantine downstairs having a breakfast which

BOSNIA

439

was as admirable as the dinner. " You have stumbled upon
something very intriguing, and very disgusting, and veiy frighten-
ing,” said Constantine, “ and lovely too, because it is the instru-
ment of the martyrdom of a saint. But may I ask you, do you not
find the coffee and the bread excellent ? ” “ Yes, yes,” we said.
” My people know how to live,” he purred, and continued.
" It unfortunately happened that after the war we were all
running hither and thither, and we had many other things to
do besides write down what we had been doing. So there was
nothing exact in the writing of the history of what had happened ;
there were no papers, because the reports of the trial were then
lost to us, and we had to hearken to all sorts of rumours that
were current in Bosnia. There really was no possibility to check
these rumours. The war had taken four years. Think what
people normally forget, in the calmest of atmospheres, during
four years ! And we had been in those years mad with courage,
with fear, with exaltation, so that what we forgot was rewritten
in our minds very dramatically. Now it happened there was
one rumour in Bosnia, which was started by a young man, long
dead now, a Croatian who originally came here on business and
liked Sarajevo and settled down. It unfortunately happened that
soon after the war this young man met Chabrinovitch’s sister and
fell madly in love with her. Many men have felt so about her ;
it is her voice, that makes one feel as if she was a vila ' ' (the Serbian
fairy, a kind of wood nymph), “ and would dance with one for
ever in the glades. But she could not love him, already she
would marry with the doctor whom you saw last night. Long,
long this other young man tried to change her heart for him,
but it could not be done. So he went away, and then it appeared
to him that the whole family of Chabrinovitch was not so wonder-
ful, and he wished to destroy them with his scorn. So he talked
about Chabrinovitch a lot, and made it seem that he was not
such a hero. Just a little shade of scorn here, just a little touch
of impatience there, and he spoiled Chabrinovitch.”

" I recognise that you are telling the truth,” I exclaimed.
" I can see that the descriptions of a jerky, fretful, loquacious,
hysterical Chabrinovitch might be a jaundiced view of a vivaci-
ous, temperamental and fluent personality such as his sister.”
" Yes,” said Constantine, ” there has been nothing grossly
untrue said about Chabrinovitch, but it has all been made a
little nasty and puny, and to this same cause I put down the

BLACK LAMB AND GREY FALCON

440

story that Chabrinovitch’s father was a police spy. I do not
believe it, for I know that his daughter has heard it, and I
know that she is such a good and true woman that she would
not deny it unless she had investigated it and found it baseless,
and if she had not found it baseless she would never have
spoken his name again."

“ What a cruel lie ! " I exclaimed. " Oh, it was not exactly
a lie," said Constantine. " I do not think this man would have
deliberately told a lie. But he loved this woman, and because
she did not love him he wanted to prove that she and everything
about her was worthless, and in this state of mind he thought
that facts bore a significance which he would certainly not have
seen in them had he gained what he wanted. Here, I imagine,
he simply misinterpreted some incident, or rather gave it
greater weight than it merits. Think of Chabrinovitch's father.
He was a monstrous egotist, ein Sxibjektivist without limit or
restraint ; it appeared to him that every part of the universe
which was not him had shown the basest treachery by separating
itself. We have seen how his children, who as you see from this
specimen I have shown you (as I will show you all, all in my
country) were really extremely serious, seemed to him un-
grateful and unnatural. It is not to be imagined that when he
was in a patriotic society, his comrades would not sometimes,
and perhaps often, seem to be conspiring against him and their
common cause, simply because they disagreed with him on
some minute point of policy. It might quite well then happen
that as a threat to his comrades he declared that he might
leave the whole of them in the lurch and go off, and inform
against them at the local police office. This threat may have
been taken in earnest by some simple people, who might be
misled by subsequent happenings into believing that he had
carried it out, though he never did so. Other people, not simple
but malevolent, may have spread stories that he had done so ;
for it cannot be expected that such a man would not make many
bitter enemies. Moreover, it may have happened, perhaps just
on one occasion, that Chabrinovitch’s father may have denounced
to the police some man in the Bosnian revolutionary movement
whom he thought a danger to it. This is a method that was
very often used by the revolutionaries in Russia under the
Tzardom, to rid themselves of comrades whom they considered
undesirable, on account of indiscretion or some form of in-

BOSNIA

441

discipline. Here amongst our people it was very rarely used ;
but remember this man was an exception, he was a law unto
himself, it is just possible that he may have done it. Still, that
he practised any sort of conscious treachery against his fellow-
Serbs, and that he was in receipt of payment from the Austro-
Hungarian authorities, that I do not believe." “ What a shame
that such a story should be told ! ” I said. “ No, not a shame,"
said Constantine, " it is something that could not be helped.
For if a woman does not do a man the little favour of handing
him over her body and her soul, regardless of whether she likes
him, it appears to him the unvarnished truth that she is a leper,
that her father is a hunchback who sold his country, that her
mother was a cripple who nevertheless was a whore. Besides,
I think between this man and Chabrinovitch there was to start
with a little bit of dislike. There is said to have been once a
little clash between them, nothing unusual between young
people who are passionate about ideas, but a sign of a lack
of sympathy."

But at this point our table was approached by one of those
pale persons in subfusc Western clothes, closely resembling the
minor characters in a Maeterlinck drama, who carry messages
in the Balkan countries. He said something to Constantine
which made him burst into happy exclamations, and gave him
a note. “ Drink up your coffee, you English people are always
eating !" cried Constantine. He had been oddly showing
his delight at the note by tearing it up into small pieces.
“ My two very good friends who are chemical manu-
facturers here are eager to see me, and they ask us to go down
to the temple of Mithras, so that they may show it to you more
properly ; but of course it is roe they want to see, for we were
very great friends when we were young in Russia.” He hurried
us out to our car and to the chemical factory, which stood
among the grass and orchards on the outskirts of the town,
incongruously urban, built with a gratuitous solidity that was
considered appropriate to industrial architecture in Central
Europe during the nineteenth century. But the two managers
were not there, and Constantine stood, in an ecstasy of dis-
appointment, crying, “ But they told me to come here,” eind
searching in his pockets for the note he had received. "You
tore the note up at the hotel,” I said. “ You English are
fantastic," said Constantine. “ Why should I have done

442

BLACK LAMB AND GREY FALCON

that ? ” By good fortune there drove up at the moment a large
car, out of which there bounded, almost vertically, two huge
men who fell upon Constantine and kissed him and smacked
his bottom and cried out lovingly with voices such as loving
bears might have. They paid no attention to my husband and
me for some time, so delighted were they with this reunion with
one whom they had evidently looked on as a little brother, as a
fighting cock, and as a magician. They turned to us and cried,
“ Such a comrade he was, in Russia ! Ah, the good little
poet ! "

But after a time Constantine told them that we must be
moving on soon, and they became flushed with the prospect of
half an hour's abandonment to their secret passion, which was
archaeology in general and the Mitbraic temple in particular,
and with great loping strides they led us along a lane and down
a field to the orchard. They came from the most western Slav
territories ; one was a Croat, and the other, the taller, came
from -Slavonia, which used to be in Hungary : but both looked
extremely and primitively Slav, as we think Russians ought to
be. The taller, indeed, belonged to that order of Russian which
looks like a gigantic full-bodied Chinaman. When we got to
the orchard it was found that the key to the gate had been left
at the factory, but they lifted up their voices and roared like
bears in pain, and there came running up the hillside a workman
in a beautiful braided plum-coloured peasant costume. When
he had learned what was the matter he went away and returned
with an axe and proceeded to break down a portion of the
wooden fence round the orchard, which was of quite respectable
solidity. While he was cutting, there approached us an extremely
handsome and venerable old Moslem priest, well suited by the
twist of white in his turban that announced his office, who, after
greeting the men in our party, joined us, for no comprehensible
reason, since he showed a profound indifference to both us and
to what we were doing. When the gap was made we all filed
through it, except for the Moslem priest. To him the sight of
a statue representing the human form was forbidden, so he sat
down with his back to the temple on a tree-trunk under a cloud
of plum blossom.

It was too plain, the Mithraic mystery, this morning. The
night before I had seen with my eyes the outlines and felt with
my finger-tips the planes that made a massy hieroglyphic mean-

BOSNIA

443

ing strength. Now I could see the emotional overtones of the
design, and its details. The god’s face was empty of all but
resolution, and resolution is not enough to fill a face ; and that
the bull’s sexual organs were excessive in size would hardly be
denied, even by another bull, and the scorpion that attacked
them was as gargantuan. Grossness was being grossly mur-
dered, with gross incidentals. No wonder women were not
admitted to this worship, for it was distinctively masculine. All
women believe that some day something supremely agreeable
will happen, and that afterwards the whole of life will be agree-
able. All men believe that some day they will do something
supremely disagreeable, and that afterwards life will move on
so exalted a plane that all considerations of the agreeable and
disagreeable will prove petty and superfluous. The female
creed has the defect of passivity, but it is surely preferable.
There is a certain logic behind it. If a supremely agreeable
event occurs it is probable that the human beings within its
scope will be sweetened, and that therefore life will be by that
much more harmonious. But there is no reason to suppose that
a supremely disagreeable event will do anything, except strain
and exhaust those who take part in it. It is not true that the
vine and the wheat spring from the blood and marrow of a
dying bull, the beasts from its sperm. The blood and marrow
and sperm of the dead clot and corrupt, and are a stench.

The two giants exhibited this lunatic altar respectfully, be-
cause they too were male. But suddenly they caught sight of
Constantine, who had climbed on an upturned basket, nosing
in the side lines for additional symbols, and at the sight of his
Pan-like plumpness they cried out, " Ah, the good Constantine,
he is just the same as ever ! " They spread out their arms and
called to him, and he came down and let them smack and
embrace him all over again. All three began to cry out, " Do
you remember ? do you remember ? ” I was listening, and
was quite unable to profit by it, to a passage of history that is,
so far as I know, uncommemorated in Western history, yet is of
considerable interest. After the Serbian Army had been driven
out of its own country by the German and Austrian invaders
and had reached the Adriatic by the famous retreat through
Albania, a number of the survivors were sent to Russia. When
the Revolution broke out some of these Serbians joined the
Whites, and some the Reds. A number who had been in touch

BLACK LAMB AND GREY FALCON

with Russian revolutionary propaganda at home played quite
conspicuous roles in the Kerensky party. When the Bolsheviks
seized power some were killed, and others followed Lenin ; but
they too were for the most part killed in the next few years.
Only a few survive, and those whom one meets have escaped
only by luck and preternatural daring.

The three survivors under my eyes were laughing so much
that they had to lean against each other to keep on their feet.
They felt they owed us an explanation, and the Croat wheezed
out between his guffaws, “ Nous dtions ensemble tous les trois
dans la fortresse de St. Paul et de St. Pierre k Petrograd." " Oui,
madame,” added the taller one, the Slavonian, " moi et notre
bon petit Constantin, nous dtions enfermds dans la meme cellule.
Et aprks nous 6tions condamnds k mort, tous les deux." At this
point Constantine remembered a joke so rich that he staggered
about and caught his breath while he tried to tell it to us. Point-
ing at the Slavonian, he gasped, " Figurez-vous, il dtait deux
fois condamn^ k mort ? Deux fois ! deux fois ! ” At the
thought of it they collapsed and sat down on the ground at the
foot of the altar, crying with laughter. At last the Slavonian
pulled himself together and said to us apologetically, wiping his
eyes, " Ah, que voulez-vous, madame ? On 6tait jeune."

Yezero

That morning we followed the river of the waterfall some
miles towards its source. It filled the trough of a broad and
handsome valley, and interrupted itself every half-mile or so
with shallow cascades, handsomely laid out in bays and scallops,
and shaded by willow-gardens. In the lower reaches of the
valley there are strung across these cascades lines of four or five
mills, little wooden huts on piles, with a contraption working
underneath which is a primitive form of the turbine. “ It is
here among my people,” said Constantine in his fat, contented
voice, “ that the principle of the turbine was invented, hundreds
of years ago.” But the mills stand very high-shouldered nowa-
days, for some years ago Yaitse was shaken with twenty-three
earth tremors, and a landslide altered the course of the river.
To please Constantine we stopped the car and went into one
of the mills, but lost heart, because there was a beautiful young

BOSNIA

445

man lying on the floor under a blanket, who woke up only to
give a smile dazzling in its suggestion that we were all accom-
plices, and closed his eyes again. So we went on our way by the
river, widened now into a lake, which held on its rain-grey
mirror a bright yet blurred image of the pastoral slopes that
rose to the dark upland forest, and which seemed, like so much
of Bosnia, almost too carefully landscape-gardened. At the end
it split with a flourish into two streams, which were linked
together by a village set with flowering trees, its minaret as
nicely placed as the flowers on those trees.

Some of its houses spoke, by lovely broken woodwork and
tiled roofs flstulated with neglect, of a vital tradition of elegance
strangled by poverty ; and this was still alive in certain houses
which in their decent proportions and their unpretentious orna-
ment, kept trim by cleanliness and new plaster, recalled, strangely
enough, some of the more modest and countryfied dwellings in
Jane Austen’s Bath. There were lilacs everywhere, and some
tulips. There was nobody about except some lovely children.
From the latticed upper storey of one of the houses that were
rotting among their lilacs, there sounded a woman’s voice, a
deep voice that was not the less wise because it was permeated
with the knowledge of pleasure, singing a Bosnian song, full of
weariness at some beautiful thing not thoroughly achieved.
They became credible, all those Oriental stories of men who
faced death for the sake of a woman whom they knew only as a
voice singing behind a harem window. Later, standing on a
bridge, watching water clear as air comb straight the green
weeds on the piers, we heard another such voice coming from a
trim Christian house, divided from a wooden mosque by a line
of poplars. This was more placid and less young, but was still
urgent, urgent in its desire to bring out beauty from the throat,
urgent to state a problem in music. Both these women made
exquisite, exciting use of a certain feature peculiar to these
Balkan songs. Between each musical sentence there is a long,
long pause. It is as if the speaker put her point, and then the
universe confronted her with its silence, with the reality she
wants to alter by proving her point. Are you quite sure, it asks,
that you are right ? Are you quite sure it is not worth while
being right about this thing ? Then the melodic line gathers
itself up and tries again to convert the inert mass of the silence
by the intensity of its argument.

446 BLACK LAMB AND GREY FALCON

In an inn by the river we drank coffee. A gendarme came to
see who the strangers might be, a huge old soldier with one eye
missing and fierce grey moustaches. " Well, how goes it, old
moustachioed one ? " asked Constantine, laying his arm about
the old man’s shoulders. Something in the turn of his words gave
credit to the old man as a soldier and a rebel and a descendant
of the Haiduks, and he blushed and laughed with pleasure. The
innkeeper’s son, a pleasant boy in his teens, made himself agp’ee-
able by showing us the brown trout and the big crayfish wriggling
in the floating box of their reserve. On the opposite bank was a
prosperous Moslem house, bright as a Christmas present just off
the tree, with a garden where the plants grew with a decorative
precision we expect only from cut flowers in a florist’s vase. It
possessed a pavilion on the water’s edge, and I was reminded,
for the second time, of Jane Austen’s Bath. Such little seemly
shelters for those who love coolness and shade and the power to
look out and not be looked at, may be found on the banks of
the Avon and on the park walls of great houses, where the traffic
goes by. Indeed Bath and the surrounding country, with its
towns that may be small but could not be taken for bumpkinish
villages, and its enjoyment of private yet not greedy delights,
such as walled gardens, is the most Moslem part of England
that I know.

A veiled woman had flitted in, her puny shoulders rounded
by the weight of something she carried under her overall. There
was a murmuring with the innkeeper’s wife in a corner, the
veiled woman flitted off again, carrying herself straighter. There
had been left for our inspection three boleros which a woman in
the village, of a fine family now poverty-stricken, wished to sell.
We laid them out on a bench and were abashed to see the value,
for the price was a pound. All were of velvet, dark rose, soft
scarlet, purple, and they were sewn so thickly with gold braid
that the velvet appeared only as a steady factor behind the
design which sprang and thrust and never lost its vital purpose
in mere incrustation. Into the purple jacket some woman had
put great cunning. Purple and gold are heavy matters, so she
had placed here and there, by threes and sixes, tiny buttons of
lavender and rose, always in a manner that lightened the burden
on the eye, sometimes together, sometimes apart. “ The woman
who did this might still be alive in the village,” I said. “ I see
they are old, but perhaps she sewed the jacket when she was

BOSNIA

447

younf'.” But I was wrong, for it was lined with an early
nineteenth-century chintz. “ How maddening that a person
like that should have been swept away by time,” I said ; “ but
her work I shall save, I shall take that home and show it to
people, and they will all like it, and I will leave it in my will to
someone who will like it, and so it will be rescued from the past.”
“Of that you cannot be sure,” said Constantine, "the past
takes enormous mouthfuls. There may come a day when no-
body will think that bolero beautiful, when it will seem simply
tedious, or ludicrous, or even evil to those who lift it from the
rag-bag.

" You are thinking that there are standards which do not
change. But I will tell you a story of the town we have just left,
of Yaitse, which will prove to you that objects which are beautiful
and even sacred in the eyes of a whole people may lose their
value in quite a few generations. When Bosnia fell to the Turks
many of the Franciscan monks stayed where they were, but one
house in Yaitse fled to the coast and set sail for Venice. They
fled in order to save the dear treasure of their church, which
was the body of St. Luke. It had been given to them by a
daughter of George Brankovitch, the despot of Serbia, who had
redeemed it for thirty thousand ducats from the Turks when
they had seized it in Epirus. But when the poor Franciscans
came to Venice, all was not well for them, and they were attacked
as if they were pagans and had brought with them a false god.
For there was already another body of St. Luke in Italy ; some
Benedictines at Padua had him already, and had had him for
three hundred years, and he was the object of an impassioned
cult of the people.

“ The Yaitsean Franciscans had to defend their title at a trial
before the Papal Legate at Venice which lasted three months.
At the end the Papal Legate said, ‘ It is right what you say,
your treasure is the true St. Luke.’ But always the Franciscans
were kept very poor and very unhappy, for the Paduans tried
again and again to get the judgment reversed. At that I
cannot wonder, for they had a strong point in their favour.
Their body was headless, the Yaitsean Luke was whole, he had
all ; but about 580 the Emperor Tiberius had given St. Gregory
the head of St. Luke, which was still in the Vatican, and which
was still shown to the people as his true head even after the Papal
Legate had pronounced that the whole body from Yaitse was

448 BLACK LAMB AND GREY FALCQN

the true St. Luke. No doubt he was in a position where he
found it difficult to be logical, for another Church in Rome had
long been curing the sick by an arm of St. Luke, which was
now certainly the third.

“ There is nobody to-day to whom that story would not
seem absurd, except very simple people, too simple people,
idiots. Those who believe in the power of relics and who are
solemn will beg you not to talk of such things, not to recall
how the stupidities of our ancestors made foolish a beautiful
thing. But most people, whether they are believing or not, will
only laugh. But the people of five hundred years ago did not
see anything ridiculous in a dead man with two heads and three
arms, all working miracles ; and they did not feel suspicious
because many monks made much money out of such dead men.
They saw something else, which made them add a head and a
head and make it one head, and two arms and one arm, and
make it two arms, and we do not know what that something
was. For me, I hate it when I read history and I see that now
there is nothing where once there was something. It shows me
that man has been eating food which has done him no good,
which has passed out of him undigested.”

Road

A man fishing from a boat in the middle of the lake stood
up and with wide sleeves waved what looked like a greeting ;
but he must have been a supernatural being in control of the
elements, and very disagreeable in disposition, for at that
moment a rage of rains broke on us. We saw nothing of our
road till Varsi Vakuf ; Christian women wearing woven aprons
of bright winy colours, Moslem men with fezes, Moslem women
with black muzzles, stood in mud during a moment’s sunshine,
marketing tiny piles of vegetables, lean and hungry livestock.
Then it rained again, and we saw as little of the new road we
took when we turned aside at Vakuf, save once when we left
the car and stood by a thicket of blackthorn that climbed over
great tombs resting on stone platforms. They are said to house
the Bogomil dead, and they have the massive and severe quality
which belongs to all manifestations of their heresy. But the
blackthorn, polished silver in a sudden outpouring of sunshine,
redeemed them. Then we came on a town that lay on the flat

BOSNIA

449

of a plain with the tedium of a military station which strategy
has dumped where natural man would never halt. “ This,”
said Constantine, " was an important garrison in Austrian days."

It was time for the midday meal, and we stopped at the hotel,
which was quite big. We went into a dining-room where a
surprisingly large number of people, including a good many
military officers, were sibling at a small table and eating in a
silence broken only by furtive whispers. I thought that they
had perhaps come to the town to attend the funeral of some
great personage, and after we sat down I asked Constantine if
this could be the case, but he answered as softly, " No, I think
there must be some generals here ”. And it was so. Presendy
four officers, of whom two were generals, rose from a table and
went out ; as soon as they had passed through the door con-
versation soared and filled the upper air, noisy as a flock of
London pigeons. Our wine was given us long before our food,
and proved to be very palatable, red and sweetish, not like any
French wine but quite good. We were wondering where it
came from, for its name gave no indication, when we received
a visit by the landlady. I found her suddenly, leaning over the
back of my chair, an elderly Jewess, with a chestnut wig, rapidly
undulant in her cringing. We asked her about the wine, and
she answered ” It is from Hungary.” “ What ? ” said Con-
stantine. " But it cannot be from Hungary, it is too cheap ; it
cannot have had any duty paid on it, it must be from Y ugoslavia. ’ '
“ No,” she said, “ it is from Hungary, it is from the Voyvodina."

Somebody called her away, and she left, with a gait so con-
ditioned by continual cringing that even between tables she
bowed from right to left and pressed her clasped hands forward
in objectless obeisances. Constantine said, “ But why does she
call the Voyvodina Hungary ? It has been ours since the war,
it is the centre of Banat. She must have some reason to hold
to the old Austrian days.” We then thought for some time of
nothing but our food, which was excellent, not in the Balkan
but in the Central European way. There was vegetable soup
without paprika, lamb stew of a Viennese type, and superb
Apfelstrudel. But while we were eating it the Jewess came
back and wavered about us, and my husband said to her,
" What beautiful German cooking you are giving us, and what
beautiful German you speak. May 1 ask where you learned
your German ? ” “ It is my native language,” she said, and

450 BLACK LAMB AND GREY FALCON

explained that she had been born in a certain town, on the
borders of Austria and Hungary. “ But I have been here for
fifty-two years. Fifty-two years, my dear,” she repeated coquet-
tishly, and slowly drew her hand down my arm with the rancid
tenderness of the procuress. There could be felt the iron hand
in the dirty velvet glove. It was sickening to reflect how
often in those fifty-two years she must have brought to the
exigencies of brothel life all they needed. One could see her
wiping up the vomit of drunkenness, striking some soft white
body into the required posture and conducting some forcible
examination in search of venereal disease, jerking a frightened
child by the arm and telling her not to whimper, carrying basins
and perhaps performing direct services in the matter of hopeless
and murderous abortions. “ I am glad you drink my poor
wine. I am glad you eat my little bit of an Apfelstrudel,” she
carneyed, and bowed backwards to the door. " Yes,” said
Constantine, “ you are perfectly right. I expect she came here
when she was a little girl of sixteen or so, to be with the officers.
I think she must have been very beautiful. And then as she
got older she managed a house. So the Austrians spread
culture among us barbaric Slavs. So she would hunger always
for her dear Austrians, and say that the Voyvodina is in
Hungary.”

As he spoke the old woman came back, followed by an
elderly man, a middle-aged man and two women in their late
thirties or early forties, who sat down at a table near us. We
had come late, and by this time the dining-room was nearly
empty, so she and her family were having their meal. The
elderly man was evidently her brother and the others her chil-
dren, but they were malevolent parodies of her. In the stock
that had produced her vigour some poison had been working
which had spared only herself. Her features, which in
her heyday must have had a Semiramic richness and decision,
were in these others splayed into Oriental rubbish. Heaps of
bone, they carried long stooping bodies on uncertain feet that
turned out at obtuse angles. It was apparent when the meal
was brought to them that the parody had been carried to a cruel
height. They could not eat properly. Often the soup missed
their mouths and ran down their chins into their plates. As the
landlady sat at the head of the table, lifting the good soup she
had made to her lips with a steady hand, looking on them with

BOSNIA

451

weary and tender eyes, and occasionally indicating some dropped
food with a word or a proffered napkin, it appeared that to her-
self her life might seem like the triumphant bearing of a cross,
a moral victory of which she might be proud. It was a point
not to be denied too hastily. Nevertheless, she was cruelty ;
she was filth.

Sartgevo VIII

We were at a party at the Bulbul’s. She had a house on the
quay by the river, not far from the comer where Franz Ferdinand
was killed, a modern house which owed its handsomeness to the
Turkish tradition, for it was full of light and clear of unnecessary
furniture, and in the large reception room on the first floor there
was a raised dais by the windows, running right across the floor,
which is a common and charming feature of Moslem houses
What furniture there was was the best obtainable of its kind,
but that kind is not good. There is no fine European furniture
in the Balkans except a few baroque pieces in Croatia and
Dalmatia. It is a contrast with the North of Europe, where the
wealthy Danish and Swedish merchants and Russian landowners
spread the knowledge of Chippendale and Sheraton right across
the Baltic. The Turkish domination cut the Balkans off from
that or any other European artistic tradition ; and when the
Balkan peoples came in contact with it, it was through the inter-
vention of Central Europe, where there has never been any good
furnitiire except the baroque and the Biedermeier, which were
based entirely on fantasy rather than on sound principles of
design and thus could found no school of cabinet-making. Taste
degenerated more rapidly in Austria during the nineteenth
century than in any other country, with the possible exception
of Russia, so she imposed on the Balkans a corrupt fashion in
these matters. A bookcase and a sideboard made by a man who
knows nothing of what the masters of his craft have discovered
in the past are apt to be merely large boxes ; and if that man
believes that quantity can be a substitute for quality, those boxes
are apt to be very big and clumsy indeed.

But the little Bulbul had bought the best furniture that this
dispensation produces, and h^ carpets and hangings were all
beautiful in the Oriental style ; and there was in every clean and
sunlit square inch of the house a sense of housewifery that was

BLACK LAMB AND GREY FALCON

4Sa

conscientious yet leisurely, inspired not by irritable dislike of
dirt but through sensuous preference for cleanliness. She
herself was unhurried, in a crisp dress that made her edible
beauty cool without chill, like the flesh of a melon. Her husband
was gracious and sculptural, gentle, even soft, and yet inunov*
able, imperishable, as a granite monolith might be that was
carved in the likeness of a tender and amiable gOd. They
had other guests, his sister and her son, who was studying
science at Zagreb ; in each of them giant liquid eyes and a
purposeful scimitar slimness transmitted the Sarajevo tradition
of prodigious good looks. It is the misfortune of the Jews that
there are kinds of Jews who rep>el by their ugliness, and the
repulsion these cause is not counterbalanced by the other kinds
who are beautiful, because they are too beautiful, because their
glorious beauty disconcerts the mean and puny element in the
Gentile nature, at its worst among the English, which cannot
stand up to anything abundant or generous, which thinks duck
too rich and Chambertin too heavy, and goes to ugly places for
its holidays and wears drab clothes. Many Gentiles, very many
English, might have come out of this room hating the people
inside for no other reason than their physical perfection.

The talk, also, might have been too good for a Western
visitor. The artist among these people so far as talking was
concerned was Constantine, who could exploit his own brilliance
with the ancient cunning of the Oriental story-teller ; but every-
body in the room knew how to support the star ; they not only
understood what he was saying, they knew the play, they could
give him his cues. Such conversation demanded attention, dis-
crimination, appreciation, all forms of expenditure which we
Westerners, being mean, are apt to grudge. But, indeed, the
main objection an English person might have felt against this
gathering was its accomplishment and its lack of shame at
showing it. When we rose from the table we went into the sunlit
room with the dais, and drank coSee which had had an egg beaten
into it so that its black bitterness should be mitigated more
subtly than by milk, and then, as the saying goes, we had a little
music. A little music !

The Bulbul took up her gusla and in a voice exquisitely and
deliberately moderate, she sang many Bosnian songs. She did
not sing them like the women in Yezero, for she was not Slav
and she had not made that acceptance of tragedy that is the

BOSNIA

453

basis of Slav life. It was as if she were repeating in a garden
what she had heard the wild Slavs wailing outside the walls.
Mischievously she sang a love-song with her eyes fixed on my
husband’s face, because it is the custom of the country to sing
such songs looking steadfastly into the beloved’s face. Every-
body laughed because it was understood that an Englishman
would find this embarrassing, but he acquitted himself gallantly,
and they clapped him on the back and told him they thought
him a good fellow. This too recalled Jane Austen’s Bath ; such
a pleasantry might have enlivened a drawing-room in the
Crescent.

Presently the Bulbul put her gusla in her husband’s hands
and said, " Now you,” and with adoring eyes she turned to her
guests and explained, “ I sing and sing well, but he not only
sings, he has a voice.” It was true. He had a voice like drowsy
thunder, forged by a god only half awake. He sang a Serbian
song, longer than most, about the pasha of the town where
Constantine was born, Shabats. He was a drunkard and a
gambler : the song suggests a mind dazed as one has seen
people in the modern world, at casinos and over card-tables, by
a certain amount of alcohol and the ecstatic contemplation of
number, divided from any substance. He had played away his
fortune ; he sat penniless in the shell of his splendour. He
suffered like a morphinomaniac deprived of his drug because he
could not gamble, so with the leisurely heartlessness of the
drunkard he ordered that his mother be taken down to the slave-
market and sold as a servant. But his wife, who was young and
beautiful and noble, came and, with the even greater leisureliness
of the heartbroken, told him that she must be sent to the slave-
market and sold instead of his mother ; for there is disgrace and
there is disgrace, and one must choose the lesser. The song
presents ruin in a framework of decorum, it takes up the melan-
choly of drunkenness and the coldness of long-standing vice and
examines them as if they were curiously coloured flowers.

But in a later song he paused, smiled, repeated the last
phrase and sang a phrase from a song by Schumann which
was like a translation of the other into its different idiom. The
science student ran to the piano, and everybody joined in
snatches of Schumann’s songs. They went on well with “ The
Two Grenadiers ”, with Constantine in the middle of the room,
acting it as well as singing it, until he spread out his arms and

VOL. I 2 G

454 BLACK LAMB AND GRBT FALCON

thundered, “ Mein Kaiser, mein Kaiser gefangen," and the
foolish little white dog which was the Bulbul’s only apparent
weakness woke up in its basket and leapt forward barking,
anxious to lend any help that was needed. They laughed ; they
were not ashamed to laugh, laughter is agreeable, and they had
come here to enjoy agreeable things together. Then they began
to sing again, but this time in mockery, pursuing German
romanticism from lyric to lyric, passing from " M}n-tillen und
Rosen " to " Poor Peter Constantine, very stout and very
red with lunch and happiness, and still accompanied by the
kindly and questioning dog, enacted poor Peter. (" Der aime
Peter wankt vorbei, Gar langsam, leichenblass und scheu.” *) In
spite of all their clowning they were singing their four parts
exquisitely, and their parody was a serious criticism of the
romantic spirit. But Constantine put up a prohibitory hand
and said, “ Enough. Now let us restore ourselves by contact
with the genius of the great Nordic One. Are we not all
Aryans ? " And they passed into a compost of scenes from
the " Ring ”, which went very well considering that Constan-
tine was singing the character of Carmen. Why Carmen ?
They knew. It was because Nietzsche in a famous passage
expressed a belief that what Wagner needed was an infusion of
the spirit of Bizet. Therefore in this performance of the Ring
Siegfried and Briinhilde were sustained through their troubles
by the companionship of the gipsy, and “ Yo-ho-ro " mingled
with the Habanera. Such musical virtuosity and such rich
literary allusiveness is, in my experience, rarely the sequel of
English lunch-parties.

There came into the room as we applauded, quiet-footed
and with his perpetual air of gentle cheerfulness about all
particular issues and melancholy about our general state, our
friend the banker, whom we had not seen for some days. The
Bulbul detached herself from the singers for a moment and
came to have her hand kissed, and stood by us for a little till
they haled her back, and she left us with the prettiest smile of
real regret thrown over her shoulder, though she was glad to
sing again. I think her idea of perfect happiness would have
been to find herself simultaneously feeding every mouth in the
universe with sugar plums. The banker watched his friends
with a smile for a moment or two, and then asked us how we

I “ Poor Peter totters, slowly by, pale as a corpse, and full of fear.”

BOSNIA

455

had enjoyed our trip through Bosnia. I said, *' It was beautiful
be3rond anything. Travnik was lovely and Yaitse better still.
But best of all I liked the sister of Chabrinovitch.” “ You are
like the dwarf in the fairy-tale who declared, ‘ Dearer to me than
any treasure is something human,* ” he said. “ I am sure you
are right, you will not see better than her in any journey. She
is truly noble." I spoke also of Yezero and the jackets, of Vakuf
and the women with the wine-coloured aprons, and lastly of
the terrible old woman at the inn where we had eaten. “ You
are quite right," he said, “ she would be what you suppose.
Indeed, I think I have heard of this woman. I will speak to
you now of things that you will not read about in any of the
books that were written by English travellers who visited Bosnia
while the Austrians were here.” " Which, if I may say so, were
not very intelligent,” I agreed. I had that morning been reading
one which I thought imbecile. The author had circulated in
fatuous ecstasy among the Austrian and Hungarian officials,
congratulating them on having introduced the mulberry tree,
which had been a most prominent feature of the Bosnian
landscape under the Turk, and congratulating the Governor’s
wife, “ called, not unjustly, the ‘ Queen of Bosnia ’ ”, on teaching
handicrafts to such women as had made the purple bolero at
Yezero. “ You see, we were not an easy people to govern any
time in the occupation, before or after the annexation. The
soldiers were all paid as if they were on active service, and the
functionaries also were given specially high salaries. This
meant that a great many camp-followers came down to our
country to batten on these men, who had plenty of money and
no natural ways of spending it. It had something of the atmo-
sphere of the Klondyke rush. .And there were many, many
prostitutes among these, and of these many were Hungarians,
not that they are a people lacking in virtue, but that the land
system left many of the peasante so poor that they had to send
their daughters out to service in the world or see them starve.
So it happens that for us Hungarian is the language of gallantry,
even as French is in London.”

He paused. The singers had stopped their opera, and were
singing old favourites. " Let us sing ‘ Wow — wow — wow — ’,”
said Constantine, and nobody could for a moment fail to realise
that he meant " Ay, ay, ay.” “ The fault,” continued the
banker, “ is not with these women, who are often exceedingly

4s6 black lamb AND GREY FALCON

kind and good, and achieve every kind of moral victory that
they are permitted, but with the Austro-Hungarian Empire,
which, although pretentiously Roman Catholic, violated all
Catholic counsels of chastity by itself organising a system of
brothels in our country, which could not be excused on the
grounds of the necessities of the troops. Certainly the brothels
they opened in Sarajevo were far in excess of the requirements
of the garrison and the functionaries. There were five very large
expensive ones, which were known as The Red Star, The Blue
Star, The Green Star and so on, and two for the common
soldiers. The Five Matches and The Last Groschen. It was a
wicked thing to do to our town, for before that we had not
such things. We Jews have our traditional morality, which
was then undisturbed. The Serbs and Croats are a chaste,
patriarchal people ; where a man will kill any other man who
has taken the virtue of his wife or daughter there must be a
harsh kind of purity. All cases where our codes broke down
were met by the gipsies, whose part it is alone among the nations
of the world to exorcise dishonour. But we had never known
prostitution, and there is something extremely exciting to a
young man in the knowledge that he can acquire the enjoyment
of a beautiful girl by payment of a small sum. To many of us,
also, the furniture of the brothels was a revelation of Western
luxury. Those who did not belong to families who had been
wealthy for a long time had never seen big mirrors before, or
gold chairs covered with red velvet, and they were profoundly
impressed. I am afraid that his Catholic Majesty the Emperor
Franz Josef did not sin only against purity when he organised
these brothels ; he committed also the sin of conspiring for the
souls of others. For I am sure the intention was to corrupt all
the young men of Sarajevo so that our nationalist spirit should
be killed and Bosnia should be easy to govern. But this would
not be only a political move ; the thought of the corruption
would in itself be delicious, for the Austrian hates the Slav,
every German hates the Slav, with an appetite that simple
death, simple oppression cannot satisfy.”

He added, " But I wonder if you can understand how mighty
hatred can be. I think you English do not, for you have long
been so fortunate that nobody else’s hatred could touch you,
and you had yourselves no reason to hate anybody. Let me
point out to you that in your journey to Travnik and Yaitse

BOSNIA

457

there was one thing you did not see. You saw nothing of the
kingdom of Bosnia. You saw a few fortresses, and perhaps a
church or two, and probably the funeral vaults of the Vakchitch
family. There is nothing else to see. Yet once the Doge of
Venice wrote to the Pope, ‘ Under our eyes the richest kingdom
of the world is burning I * and he meant Bosnia. Conquest can
swallow all. The Turks consumed Bosnia. The Austrians
did what they could to consume that little which remained, but
they then had weak mouths. But sometimes I fear lest some of
their blood have grown strong jaws like the Turks."

SERBIA >

Train

WE left Sarajevo in the early morning’, picking our way
over the peasants who were sleeping all over the floor
of the station. Nothing we believe about peasants in
the West is true. We are taught to think of them as stolid,
almost physically rooted to the soil and averse from the artificial.
Nothing could be less true, for the peasant loves to travel, and
travels more happily by train than on horseback. In old Spain
1 first remarked it. At the junctions trains used to stand packed
as they are in the English Midlands, where there are myriad
commercial occasions to set people travelling : but these had
nobody in them except peasants who can have had the slenderest
material motives to leave their homes. In the account of the
Sarajevo trial the mobility of the prisoners and the witnesses is
far greater than that of anybody in England below the more
prosperous middle classes. Now that the country is self-
governing and there are fewer restrictions, every train and
motor omnibus is stuffed with people amiable with enjoyment,
as if they were going to a Cup Tie, but with no Cup Tie whatso-
ever in view.

The journey out of Sarajevo is characteristic, leisurely and
evasive and lovely. The train starts at the bottom of the bowl
in which the city lies, and winds round it and comes out at a
nick in the rim. There is a high station at the nick, and there
one looks down for the last time on the hundred minarets, the
white houses and the green flames of the poplars. Thereafter
the train travels through a Swiss country of alps and pinewoods,
with here and there a minaretted village, until it goes into a
long wooded gorge, which has one superb moment. Where two

•*58

SERBIA

459

rivers meet they thunder down on each side of a great rock
that has been sharpened by ages of their force to a razor-edged
prow. Sometimes we looked at the scenery and sometimes we
slept, and often we listened to Constantine, who throughout
our entire journey, which lasted thirteen hours, talked either to
us or some of the other passengers. The first time I was in
Yugoslavia Constantine took me down to Macedonia so that I
could give a broadcast about it, and when we arrived at Skoplje
I thought I would have to run away, because he had talked to
me the whole time during the journey from Belgrade, which
had lasted for twelve hours, and I had felt obliged to listen.
Now I know that in conversation Constantine is like a pro-
fessional tennis-player, who does not expect amateurs to stand
up to his mastery for long, who expects to have to play to relays,
so sometimes I did not listen to him, until I caught one of the
formulas which I know introduce his best stories.

“ When you are in Belgrade,’* said he to my husband, " you
will meet my wife. My wife she is a German. She was very,
very beautiful, and she is of a very old German family, and they
did not wish her to marry me, so I rapted her from them in an
aeroplane. And for long they would not be good with me, and
1 was not always very fortunate in the efforts 1 made to win them.
You see, my mother-in-law she is the widow of a Lutheran
pastor, and I know well that is a different religion from mine,
but I think there are only two Christian religions in Europe,
and one is the Orthodox Church and the other is the Roman
Catholic Church. Now I know that my mother-in-law is not
an Orthodox, for one of the things that disgusts her with me is
that I am Orthodox, so it seems to me that to be Lutheran is to
be some kind of Catholic. Perhaps a Catholic that lets his
pastor be married. So one day my wife and I are staying with
my mother-in-law among the mountains, and my mother-in-law
and I are having breakfast on the balcony, before my wife has
come down, and there is sunshine, and the coffee is so good, and
there are many flowers, and I am so happy that I say to myself,
‘ Now is the time to make myself pleasant to the old lady ’, so
I say to her that I see in the papers that the Pope is ill, and that
I am sorry, because I think very well of the Pope, and I give
her instances of all the things that have made me think the
Pope is a good and wise man. I point to the snow peaks in
the distance, and I say that to climb such heights is a great

46o black lamb AND GREY FALCON

achievement, and so often had done the Pope, for he is a great
mountaineer ; and from that I pass on to the Papal Edicts,
and praise their wisdom and discretion. And my mother-in-
law says nothing to me, but that does not surprise me, because
often I talk all, and others not at all. But then my wife comes
down and my mother-in-law stands up and cries to her, ' Look
at the savage you have married, that sits there and on such a
beautiful morning praises in my very face the Pope, who is
the devil ! ’

" And from her side the efforts to be friends with me are
often not very good, though in time she came to like me. It is
so with the white beer. Do you know white beer ? It is the
last of all that is fade in the world, and it is adored by the
petite bourgeoisie in Germany. They go to the beer-gardens
in the woods and by the lakes and with their little eyes they
look at the beauties of their Germany, and they drink white
beer, which is the most silly thing you can drink, for it does not
taste of anything and cannot make you drunk. It is just like
the life of the petit bourgeois in liquid form, but it is gross in its
nothingness, so that some of them who have shame do not like
it, and order raspberry syrup to add to it. But there are those
who are not ashamed of being fade and they would not spoil
it with a flavour, and they order ‘ ein Weisses mit ohne . .
Mit ohne, mit ohne, could you have anything that is better for
the soul of the petite bourgeoisie that is asked what it wants and
says, ‘ I want it with without That is to be lost, to be damned
beyond all recovery, and yet there they are very happy, they
sit in their beer-gardens and ask for mit ohne. It is altogether
delicious, it is one of those discords in the universe that remind
us how beautifully God works when He works to be nasty.
Once I said this in front of the mother-in-law, and do you know
ever after she gives me to drink this horrible white beer. And
my wife has tried to tell her she should not do so, and my mother-
in-law says, ‘ You are foolish, I have heard him say he likes very
much mit ohne,' and my wife she says, ‘ No, you have it wrong,
it is the expression mit ohne he likes,’ and my mother-in-law
says, ‘ How can you say such nonsense, why should he be pleased
when people say they will have white beer without raspberry
syrup ? ’ And to that there is nothing to be said, so I must
drink white beer, though I am a Serb and therefore not a petit
bourgeois, but a lord and a peasant.”

SERBIA

461

We were passing through lumber country, by a river on
which we saw the lumbermen steering great rafts of logs over
the rapids. “ Some day you must travel so,” said Constantine,
“ in the calm places you will hear the men singing so wonder-
fully.” We passed through Vishegrad, a lumber town with
many stacks of new logs and old houses with minarets and a
wide brown bridge over which there rode on a pack-horse a
Moslem who must have been very old, or from the far south,
for alone of all Bosnian Moslems I have ever seen he wore the
head-dress which preceded the fez among the Turks, the
turban. Then I slept a little and woke up in a little town
where there was not a minaret, where there was no more trace
of Islam than there would be in a Sussex village. We were, in
fact, in Serbia. We went and stood on the platform and breathed
the air, which was now Serbian air. It is as different from
Bosnian air as in Scotland the Lowland air differs from High-
land air ; it is drier and, as they say of pastry, shorter. Any-
body who does not know that it is one pleasure to fill the lungs
up at Yaitse or Loch Etive and another to fill them down at
Belgrade or the Lammermuir Hills, must be one of those
creatures with defective sensoria, who cannot tell the difference
between one kind of water and another. On the platform a
ceremony was going on, for there was travelling on our train an
officer, a light-haired boy in his twenties, who had once been
in the garrison of this town, and had afterwards been moved
south and was returning northward to take up some new and
more exalted duty. The people of the town had heard before-
hand that he would be passing through and had gathered with
their children to congratulate him on his promotion. It could
be grasped, chiefly from their cheering when the train arrived
and left, that they had liked him very much ; but when he was
standing in front of them he and they alike were transfixed
with shyness, evidently arising from the sense of sacredness of
military glory, for from what they said it appeared that he had
reached a rank extraordinary for so young a man. He was
extremely touching as he stood before them solemn with honour,
his compact body whittled down from broad shoulders to a
slim waist and lean haunches by discipline and exercise. He
had one of those Slav faces that puzzle the Westerner, for he
had the stern eyes and brows and cheek-bones with which we
expect hard, thin lips, but his mouth was full and sensitive. I

462 BLACK LAMB AND GREY FALCON

liked the look of him as he stood there in his neat, olive uniform ;
I liked the faces of the children lifted to him, tranced by the
thought of his austere and defensive destiny. There are better
things in life than fighting, but they are better only if their
doers could have fought had they chosen.

" My tovm is Shabats,” said Constantine, and I listened,
for all his best tales begin with those words. " In Shabats
we were all of us quite truly people. There were not many
people who spoke alike and looked alike as there are in Paris
and in London and in Berlin. We were all of us ourselves and
different. I think it was that we were all equal and so we could
not lift ourselves up by trying to look like a class that was of
good repute. We could only be remarkable by following our
own qualities to the furthest. So it is in all Serbian towns, so
it was most of all in Shabats, because we are a proud town, we
have always gone our own way. When old King Peter came to
visit Shabats he spoke to a peasant and asked if he did well,
and the peasant said he did very well, thanks to the trade in
pigs and smuggling. Wc do not at all care, yet we care much.
The peasant would tell the King he smuggled and broke his
law, but he would die for the King. In the war we were a very
brave town. The French decorated us as they decorated Verdun.

“ I would like to take you to see Shabats. But it is not as
it was. I mean I do not know it now. You might not be
disappointed by a visit, but I should be, because I should not
be able to introduce you to all the people that were there when
I was young, and that now are dead. Some of them were so
very nice, and so very strange. There was an old man that I
was very fond of, yes, and I loved his wife too. He had made
something of a fortune out of making Army clothing, and he
made it honestly, for he was a good, patriotic man, and did not
cheat the poor soldiers. So with his money he could follow his
mania, which was for the new thing, for Science, for the machine,
for the artificial, the modern. You may not remember it, for I
think it came earlier with you than with us, but there was some
time ago a rage for such things. It was partly due to your
H. G. Wells and his imitators, and it was partly due to our ideas
about America, which we then believed to be entirely covered
with sky-scrapers and factories. I had it myself a little, which
is how I became friendly with the old man, for I spoke of such
things before him and after that he used to send for me some*

SERBIA

463

times to come to his home and eat, because he had been to
Belgrade or Novisad, and had brought back a tin of vegetables
or fruit, so 1 used to sit down with him and his wife in the midst
of the country which grows the best fruit and vegetables in the
world and we used to smack our lips over some pulpy asparagus
and tumipy peaches from California, and talk of the way the
world was going to be saved when we all lived in underground
cities and ate preserved food- and had babies artificially ger-
minated in tanks and lived for ever.

I was only a boy then and I grew out of it, but the old
man was firm in the faith, and his wife, who, I think, never
believed in it at all but who loved him very dearly, followed
him. I have said he was very rich, and so he was able to have
the first sewing-machine in our town, and then the first gramo-
phone, and then the first motor car, which, as we then had no
roads for motoring, was of no use to him, but sent him into
ecstasy. But there were many other objects on which he
gratified his passion, far more than you would believe. His
house was full of them. He had many very odd clocks ; one I
remember very well, the dial of which was quite hidden, which
told the time only by throwing figures of light on the ceiling,
which was all very well in the dark, but cannot have been much
use to my friends, who always went to bed early and slept like
dogs till the sunrise. He also fitted his house with a water-
closet, which he was always changing for a newer pattern.
Some of these water-closets were very strange, and I have never
in my life seen anything like them since, and I cannot imagine
what ideas were in the inventors’ minds. In some kinds one
had to go so and so, and why in a water-closet should one go
so and so ? Surely that is the one place in the world where a
man knows quite simply what he has to do. The clothes of
my friends were very strange also. He would not wear peasant
costume, of course, but as soon as he had adopted Western
costume, he rebelled against that also, and he had ties that
fastened with snappers and trousers that were made in one
with a waistcoat. But he was worse about his wife’s dress.
He made her wear knickerbockers under her skirts, which our
women used not to do, and which for some reason shocked
them. Trousers they knew from the Turks, and skirts they know,
but trousers under the skirts, that they thought not decent. And
when he heard of brassi^es those too he sent for, and made his

464 BLACK LAMB AND GREY FALCON

wife wear them, and as she was an old peasant woman, very
stout, they had to be enormously enlarged, and even then they
remained clearly to be seen, never quite accommodated to her
person. And he was so proud of having everything modem that
he could not help telling people that she was like an American
woman, and was wearing knickerbockers and brassi^es, and
then the poor thing grew scarlet and suffered very terribly, for
our women are modest. But she endured it all, for she loved
him very much.

“ I know how she loved him, for I became involved in her
heart. You know that young men are very callous, and when
1 had got out of my boyhood it no longer seemed to be glorious
to eat tinned vegetables, and 1 laughed at my old friend behind
my hand. When 1 came from Paris after my first year at the
Sorbonne, 1 went to see them and out of wickedness I began to
tell them preposterous stories of new machines which did not
really exist. Some of them might have existed, indeed some of
them have come to exist since then. I remember I told them
an American had discovered a system by which houses and
trains were always kept at the same temperature, no matter
what the weather is like outside. It is air-conditioning, it is
now quite true, but then it was a lie. And I went on so telling
more and more absurd stories, until I said, ‘ And of course I
was forgetting, there is the artificial woman that was invented
by the celebrated surgeon Dr. Martel. That is quite wonderful.’
And my old friend said to me, ‘ An artificial woman ? What
is that ? A woman that is artificial ! For God’s sake ! Tell
us all about it ! ’ So I went on and on, telling many things that
were not at all true, and that were not honest, and my friend
listened with his eyes growing great, and then I looked at his
wife and her eyes were great too, and they were full of pain.
Then my old friend said to me, ‘ But you must get me one, you
must get me an artificial woman ! ’ He could afford all, you see,
and I realised she had known that he was going to say that, and
that she was terribly sad, because she knew that she was his
real wife and that she would not be able to keep him from an
artificial mistress. So I said it was not ready yet, that Dr.
Martel was working on it to improve it, and that it could not
be bought, and then I sweated hard to tell him something that
would make him forget it, and drank more plum brandy, and I
pretended to be drunk. But before 1 left he came round to my

SERBIA

46s

house and he told me to bring hkn back an artificial woman,
that he did not care at all how much it cost, and that he would
sell all he had to be possessed of such a marvel.

“ So it was every time I came back from Paris on my
holidays. I would go to their house and he would talk of other
things for a time, but only as a little boy who has been well
brought up, and knows that he must talk to the uncle for a little
while before he asks, ‘ And did you not forget my toy train ? ’
But sooner or later he would say, ‘ Now about the artificial
woman ? Is she ready yet ? ’ And I would shake my head and
say, ‘ No, she is not yet ready.’ Then I would see his wife’s
face grow so happy and young and soft. She had him a little
longer. Then I would explain that Dr. Martel was a very
conscientious man, and a very great surgeon, and that such men
like to work very slowly and perfectly. And then I would put
my hand up so that she would not hear, and I would tell him
some story that would not be very decent, of how the artificial
woman had broken down under experiment, but the old man
would listen with his eyes right out of his head, and she would
go away to the kitchen and she would fetch me the best of her
best, some special preserve or a piece of sucking-pig that she
had meant to keep for the priest, because I said that the
artificial woman was not yet ready. And I saw that she was
getting very fond of me, like a mother for her son, and I grieved,
for I did not like to have brought this sorrow to her by a silly
joke. I felt very ashamed when she came to see me at a time
when the cold wind had made me bad with my lungs, and it
was as if I should go like my sister, who had died when she was
sixteen, and I said to her, ‘ Aunt, you are too good to me. I
have done nothing for you,’ and she answered with tears in her
eyes, ‘ But you have been as good to me as a son. Do you
think I am so simple that I do not know the artificial woman
must long ago be finished, with such a clever man as you say
working on it ? You tell my husband that it is not so only
because you know that I could not bear to have such a creature
in my house.’ There was nothing at all that I could say. I
could not confess to her that I had been a monkey without
making it plain to her that her husband had been an ass. As
many people in the town laughed at him, and she was more
aware of it than he was and hated them on his account, I could
hot admit that 1 had been of their party, she would have felt

466 BLACK LAMB AND GREY FALCON

betrayed. So I could do nothing but kiss her hand and tell
her that always, always I would protect her heart from the
artificial woman.

" The last year of my studies was the last year before the
war, and then I did not come back for my holidays at ail, I
was studying too hard philosophy under Bergson and the piano
under Wanda Landowska, and then for years I was a soldier
and all people were swept away, and it did not seem to matter
to ask how or where they were. So it was not till years after
that I heard what had happened to my two old friends. It is a
terrible story to me, not only because I had a sort of love for
them, but because it is typical of us Slavs. We are a light
people, full of Ugireti till it becomes heavy as lead, and then we
jump into the river for no reason, and if our Ugireti had not
grown heavy as lead one would say for the sake of sport, but
that has altered the case. Do you remember — ^no, we none of us
can remember it, but we all have read of it — that at the end
of the century people believed that something had happened
to humanity and that we were all decadent and that we were
all going to commit suicide? Fin de siicle, the very phrase
means that. Everything takes a long time to reach this country
and this talk arrived here very late, in 1913, and in the mean-
time it had been translated into German and it had become
heavy and morbid and to be feared. It came to this poor silly
old man and he learned that the most modern thing to do was
to kill yourself, and so he did it. He became very melancholy
for a time, working at it as other old men work at learning
chess, and then went into his stable and hanged himself, to be
modern, to have an artificial death instead of a natural. I think
he was probably sure that there was immortality, for though he
believed he was a freethinker I do not believe it ever crossed his
mind that he would not live after death. And soon after his
wife also hanged herself, but I do not think there was anything
modern about her reasons, they could not have been more
ancient. In Shabats many strange things happened, very many
strange things indeed, but I think that 6f all of them not nothing
was not never more sad."

I slept, and woke up into a world of mirrors. They stretched
away on each side of the railway, the hedges breathing on
them with their narrow images. We were passing through
the floods that every year afflict the basin of the Danube and its

SERBIA

467

tributaries, and to me, who love water and in my heart cannot
believe that many waters can be anything but pleasure heaped
upon pleasure, there came a period of time, perhaps twenty
minutes or half an hour, of pure delight. During this period I
remained half asleep, sometimes seeing these floods before me
quite clearly yet with an entranced eye that was not reminded
by them of anything I had learned of death and devastation
since my infancy, sometimes falling back into sleep and retaining
the scene before my mind’s eye with the added fantasy and
unnameable signiflcance of landscapes admired in dreams. The
scene was in fact if not actually unearthly, at least unfamiliar
in aspect, because of the peculiar quality of the twilight. Light
was leaving the land, but not clarity. For some reason, perhaps
because there was a moon shining where we could not see it, the
flooded flelds continued to reflect their hedges and any height and
village on their edge as clearly as when it had been full day :
and though the dusk was heavier each time I opened my eyes I
could still see a band of tender blue flowers which grew beside
the railway. By mere reiteration of their beauty these flowers
achieved a meaning beyond it and more profound, which, at
any rate when I was asleep, seemed to be immensely important
though quite undefined and undefinable, like the sense of
revelation effected by certain refrains in English poetry, such
as “ the bailey beareth the bell away ”.

But presently the floods were blotted out from me, as
thoroughly as if a vast hand had stretched from the sky and
scattered earth on the waters till first they were mud and then
land. Then Constantine came back into the compartment
after an absence I had not noted, his face purplish, his black
eyes hot and wet, his hands and his voice and his bobbing
black curls lodging a complaint against fate. He sat down on
the feet of my husband, who till then had been asleep, and he
said, “ On this train I have found the girl who was the first
real love of my life. She was of my town, she was of Shabats,
and we went to school together, and when we grew to the age
of such things, which among us Serbs is not late, we were all
for one another. And now she is not young any more, she is
not beautiful, she has more little lines under her eyes even than
you have, but it can be seen that she was very beautiful indeed,
and that she is still very fine, very fine in the way that our
women sometimes are, in the way that my mother is fine, very

468 BLACK LAMB AND GREY FALCON

good for her husband, very good for her children, and something
strong beyond. You know my mother was a very great pianist.
It seems to me it would have been very well for me if I had made
this girl my wife before the war and had come back to her, for
I had terrible times when I came back from the war and it
would have been good if I had had a grand woman like this to
stand by me. But she would not have me ; though we had been
sweethearts for two years I knew that when I left Shabats to
go to the Sorbonne she was glad to see that I am going, and
all the way to Paris I was glad that it looked very well and as
it should be, and I the man was leaving her the woman and
going to a far place and having new adventures, because I
knew that was how it was not and that she was tired of me.
Never did I write to her because I was afraid she would not
answer.

“ But now when I saw her here on the train I knew that it
was a pity it was so, and I said to her, * Why did you treat me
so ? When I was young I was very handsome and my father
was very rich and already you knew I was a poet and would be
a great man, for always I was a Wunderkind, but you did not
want me, though I think that once you loved me. What had
you ? ' At first she would not tell me, but I asked her for a
long time, and then she said, ‘ Well, if you trouble me so for so
long a time, I will tell you. There is too much of you ! You
talk more than anybody else, when you play the piano it is more
than when any other person plays the piano, when you love it is
more than anybody else can make, it is all too much, too much,
too much ! ’ Now, that I cannot understand. I talk interesting
things, for I have seen many interesting things, not one man in
a hundred has seen so many interesting things, your husband
has not seen so many interesting things. And I play the piano
very well, also when I love with great delicacy of heart, and in
passion I am a great experience for any woman. And you must
ask my dear wife if I am not a kind man to my family, if I do
not do all for my little sons. Now, all these things are good
things, how can I do them too much ? And I am sure that at
first she loved me, and when she saw me here in this train she
was so glad to see me that her eyes shone in ecstasy. Why
then did she become weary and let me go to Paris with all
things finished between us ? why does she now become cross
and tell me there is too much of me ? Why have I so many

SERBIA

469

enemies, when I would only do what is good with people, and
when I would ask nothing but to be gentle and happy ? I will
go back and ask her, for she cannot have meant just what she
said, for it was not sensible, and she is a very fine sensible
woman."

When he had gone my husband sighed, and said, “ Good
old Constantine. Now in all my life I have never got on a train
and met a woman I used to love. Indeed, the nearest I have
ever come to it was once going down to Norfolk when I met
my old matron at Uppingham. That was indeed quite agree-
able. But really, I prefer it that way. It seems to me that
the proper place for the beloved is the terminus, not the train.”
" I am, however, travelling with you on this occasion,” I re-
minded him. “ Yes, my dear, so you are," he said, closing
his eyes.

I myself slept after a time ; and when I awoke he was still
asleep and it was night, and a conductor was telling me that we
were near Belgrade. We packed our books and collected our
baggage and went to look for Constantine. He had fallen
asleep in the corner of another compartment, and was now
sitting half awake, running his hand through his tight black
curls and smiling up at the lamp in the roof. There was no sign
of the first woman he had ever loved, and he said, ” As I woke
up I thought of a beautiful thing that happened to me when I
was a student in Paris. Bergson had spoken in one of his lectures
of Pico della Mirandola, who was a great philosopher in the
Renaissance but now he is very hidden. I do not suppose you
will ever have heard of him because you are a banker, and your
wife naturally not. He did not say we must read him, he just
spoke of him in one little phrase, as if he had turned a diamond
ring on his finger. But the next morning I went to the library
of the Sorbonne and I found this book and I was sitting reading
it, and Bergson came to work in the library, as he did very often,
and he passed by me, and he bent down to see what book I had.
And when he saw what it was he smiled and laid his hand so on
my head. So, I will show you.” Passing his plump hand over
his tight black curls, he achieved a gesture of real beauty. " That
happened to me, nothing can take it away from me. I am a
poor man, I have many enemies, but I was in Paris at that time,
which was an impossible glory, and so Bergson did to me.” He
sat with his heels resting on the floor and his toes turned up, and

VOL. I 2 H

470 BLACK LAMB AND GREY FALCON

his black eyes winking and twinkling. He was indestructibly,
eternally happy.

The railway station at Belgrade is like any big railway station
anywhere. It was odd to step back from a world where every-
thing had its strong local flavour into scenes which were familiar
precisely because they were so flavourless, so international in the
pejorative sense of the word. In the colourless light descend-
ing its vaults there waited Constantine’s wife, Gerda, a stout
middle-aged woman, typically German in appearance, with fair
hair abundant but formless, and grey eyes so light and clear
that they looked almost blind, vacant niches made to house
enthusiasms. She wore a grey coat and skirt and a small hat of
German fashion, and among the dark hurrying people she stood
as if drawing contentment from her own character, from her
advantageous difference. When we got out of the train Con-
stantine ran at her and hugged her, and she smiled over his
shoulder at us in resigned amusement. Then she greeted me
and my husband was introduced to her, and it might have been
a tea-party in Hamburg or Berlin, with the same proud stress on
a note which nobody not German can define. It is not magnifi-
cence ; the slightest touch of the grand manner would be re-
garded as absurd. It is not simplicity ; massive elaboration is
required in furniture, in dress, in food. It is not the moderation
of the French bourgeoise, for that is based on craftsmanship, on
a sense that to handle material satisfactorily one must keep one’s
wits about one and work coolly and steadily ; these people at
such tea-parties have no sense of dedication to the practical
and financial problems of a household, they have an air of
regarding it as an ideal that by handsome expenditure they
should buy the right to be waited upon. Yet there is nothing
wild, nothing extreme, about them or Gerda, only aims that are
respected by the mass, such as continuity and sobriety. There
is a positive element, even impressive in its positiveness, that
welds these negatives into a dynamic whole ; but I have no
idea what it is.

We stood still together while Constantine and my husband
looked for a lost suitcase, in an amiable yet uneasy silence. She
took my book from my hand, looked at the title, and handed it
back to me with a little shake of the head and a smile, full of
compassionate contempt. It was a book called The Healing
Ritual, by Patience Kemp, a study of the folk-medicine of the

SERBIA

47*

Balkan Slavs, which traced the prescriptions and practices it
described back to early Christianity, to pre-Christian mythology,
and to the culture of Byzantium and Greece and the Orient.
Puzzled by Gerda’s expression, for it seemed to me a most
admirable book, I asked, " Have you read it ? ” “ No," she
said, smiling and shaking her head again, “ but I do not believe
it. I am not a “ But it is not that sort of book at all,”

I said, " it is by a graduate of the School of Slavonic Studies,
who is also a trained anthropologist, and she has travelled all
over the country collecting legends and customs and analysing
them.” Gerda continued to smile, bathed in satisfaction at the
thought of her superiority to Miss Kemp in her poetic fantasy,
to me in my credulity. ‘‘ But it is a work of great learning,”
I insisted. Miss Kemp could obviously look after herself and
I did not care what Gerda thought of my intelligence, but there
seemed to me something against nature in judging a book with-
out having read it and in sticking to that judgment in spite of
positive assurances from someone who had read it. “ It is
published by a firm called Faber,” I continued ; “ they do not
publish books such as you imagine this to be.” She turned
away so that she stood at right angles to me, her smile soared up
above us ; I could see her spirit, buoyed up by a sense of
the folly of myself, of Miss Kemp, of Messrs. Faber, mount-
ing and expanding till it filled the high vaults of the railway
station. Unconstrained by any sense of reality, there was no
reason why it should not.

Be^ade

When we were having breakfast in our bedroom a chamber-
maid came in about some business, one of those pale women
with dark hair who even in daylight look as if one were seeing
them by moonlight, and we recognised each other and talked
affectionately. It was Angela, a Slovene, who had been very
kind to me when I was ill in this hotel with dengue fever last
year. She was the gentlest and sweetest of women and for that
reason had developed a most peculiar form of hysteria. Perhaps
because of her experience as a tiny child in the war she was a
true xenophobe, she could not imagine anything more disgusting
than a member of another race than her own. But she did not
like to feel anything but love for her fellow-creatures, so she

472 BLACK LAMB AND GREY FALCON

transformed her loathing for them into a belief that they exude
powerful and most unpleasant odours. This belief made her
life as a chambermaid an extraordinary olfactory adventure, for
to this hotel there came people of all nationalities. She staggered
from room to room on her round of duties, almost in need of a
gas-mask when she came to making the beds. Her political
convictions led her to think very poorly of the Bulgarians, the
Italians and the Greeks, and therefore it appeared to her that
these people smelt like manure-heaps, like the area round a
gasometer, like a tanner’s yard. Particularly was this so with
the Greeks. When she spoke of her daily work in the suite then
occupied by a wealthy young Greek merchant her face assumed
a look of poignant physical apprehension, as if she were a miner
talking of the firedamp which might provoke a disaster. The
Hungarians seemed to her to have a strong smell, which however
was not unpleasant, only extremely different from the smell a
human being ought to exhale. But the Germans and Austrians
were definitely very gross in her nostrils, and the French smelt
wicked and puzzling, as I imagine a chemist’s shop might to a
country woman who knew the uses of hardly any of the articles
it exhibited.

About the natives of countries more remote she knew less,
so she smelt less, and about such people as the Swedes and Finns
her nose invented what were to full odours as suspicions are to
certainties. To test her, I told her that I was not truly English,
but half Scottish and half Anglo-Irish. This distracted her,
because she had never heard of the Scottish or Irish, and while
she was won to Scotland by my explanation of the resemblance
between the Scottish and the Bosnians, it rightly seemed to her
that to be Anglo-Irish was to be like an Austrian or Hungarian
landowner among the Slovenes or Croats, or to be a Turkish
landowner among the conquered Slavs. She would cry out as
she made my bed, “ I have it, I know what you smell like,” and
it would always be something valuable but ambiguous, not
universally appreciated, such as some unusual herb, some rarely
used kind of wood. But there would be some strain of pleasant-
ness in the comparison, due to her belief that the Scottish re-
sembled the Bosnians. And no matter how I and other border-
line cases smelt, her toil was not repellent, since the foul miasma
given out by the foreign guests of the hotel was exorcised and
exquisitely replaced by the fragrance, stronger than that of

SERBIA 473

rosery or herb garden because it was imaginaiy, which' hung
about the rooms occupied by Croats, Serbs and Slovenes,

" I feel happier about your illness now that I have been here
and seen that the hotel is very good, and that the people are so
very friendly," said my husband, “ but it looked terrible when I
read in the papers before I had got your letter that you were
ill in a hotel in Belgrade. I thought of Belgrade then as the
Viennese talk of it, as the end of the earth, a barbarian village."
" I am sorry I tried to keep it from you,” I said, " but after all
I too had a shock when I read of my illness in the paper. For
it said that I was in the care of two doctors : but there were three
gentlemen coming in every day and baring my bosom and laying
their heads against my heart, and I had hoped they were all
members of the medical profession. On the whole, I have never
been more happily ill than I was here. When my temperature
was very high and I really felt wretched, Angela and two other
chambermaids and a waiter came and stood at the end of my
bed and cried nearly the whole afternoon. Also my nurse cried
a lot. I liked it enormously.” " But you always say you hate
scenes,” said my husband. " So I do, when I am well, there are
so many other things to do,” I answered ; ” but when I am ill
it is the only incident that can cheer and reach me under the
blankets. And really it is sensible to show emotion at serious
illness. Death is a tragedy. It may be transmuted to some-
thing else the next minute, but till then it is a divorce from the
sun and the spring. I also maintain that it would have been a
tragedy for myself and for a few other people if I died in my
early forties, so it was quite logical for susceptible people to
burst into tears at such a prospect and neglect the bells that their
more robust clients were pressing. I am quite sure that it must
be more exhilarating to die in a cottage full of people bewailing
the prospect of losing one and the pathos of one’s destruction
than to lie in a nursing-home with everybody pretending that the
most sensational moment of one’s life is not happening.”

" I see that,” said my husband, “ but you must remember
that if people behaved like that they would not be able to bear
the strain of patiently nursing the victims of long illnesses.”
“ That is what is called taking the long view,” I said, “ and I
do not believe it is so superior to the short view as is supposed.
I remember once going a walk in Greece with two English-
women, one of them the enchanting Dilys Powell, to see a marble

474 BLACK LAMB AND GREY FALCON

lion that lies somewhere near the foot of Mount Hymettus, when
from a long way off we had seen some peasants about their
business of repainting and cleaning a little church that had been
erected to commemorate the feat of a Christian saint, who had
turned to marble this lion (which was in fact archaic and many
centuries older than any Christian). Suddenly one of their
number who was walking away from the church towards a farm
stopped in horror, just where the grass grew long at the edge of
the road, looked down and cried out to his companions, who also
looked down and then also cried out. Some went down on their
knees on the ground, others ran back to the church and returned
carrying things. When we got there we found that the first
peasant had stopped because he had come on an old man who
had fallen in a faint by the roadside, from hunger and thirst and
weariness. He was, as one of the peasants explained to us, one
of " those without corn", a peasant who for some reason has no
land and must tramp the country seeking to be employed by
others. The English ladies might find it difficult to believe, he
said, speaking with embarrassment, that such people existed,
since we were from a rich country, but in a poor country like
Greece there were some of them. This I found extremely em-
barrassing. But I forgot that, in my pleasure in the delightful
kindness they were showing the old man, the way they were
folding coats and cloaks to make a bed for him, and holding up
to his mouth bottles of wine and pieces of bread, and crying out
what a shame it was that he should have to be wandering on
such a day and without food.

“ Then one of my companions said, ' Yes, they are like this,
very kind to people in trouble at first, but they are like children,
they soon get tired. So-and-so of the British colony in Athens
was taken ill with fever when he was walking in the mountains,
and some peasants took him in and looked after him with extra-
ordinary care for a few days, and then they simply turned him
out.' I felt a jar at that, for it seemed to me that here was a
difference between primitive and civilised practice, which was,
on the whole, to the advantage of the primitive. For there are
more short illnesses than long, at least in circumstances where
one is obliged to be dependent on strangers ; and sympathy
seems to me more necessary for acute pains than for chronic
suffering, which gives one time to muster one’s defences. That,
indeed, is something about which 1 feel bitterly. Twice it

SERBIA

475

happened to me, before I married you, that people who were
close friends of mine wrote enquiring how I was and what my
plans were, and I had to write back to them telling that an
extraordinary calamity had befallen me, something almost as
exh'aordinary as that a wicked stepmother had sent me out into
the woods in winter with instructions not to come back till I had
gathered a basket of wild strawberries, and infinitely agonising
as well. On neither occasion did I receive any answer : and
when I met my friends afterwards each told me that she had
been so appalled by my news that she had not been able to And
adequate words of sympathy, but that I was not to think she was
anything but my friend and would be till death. And indeed
both women are still my friends. It, however, only gives me a
modified pleasure, it presents me with the knowledge that two
people know me very well and enjoy my society but are not
inspired by that to do anything to save me when I am almost
dying of loneliness and misery, and that this unexhilarating
relationship is likely to persist during my lifetime. It seems to
me it would have been much better for me if I had had someone
who would have cried out and said it was a shame that I should
be so unhappy, as the peasants did when they found the old man
by the roadside."

My husband said, " I wonder. I wonder very much indeed.
This has all something to do with economics.” " What on
earth ? ” I said derisively. " I am moved and your friends
were moved, by fear of exceeding emotion,” he explained, " and
I believe it is because Western people always regard their
emotion exactly as they do their material wealth. Now in a
highly artificial capitalist society such as we live in, one’s
money comes to one piece by piece, and if one spends it one
might not be able to replace it, because the circumstances in
which one made it may not be repeated, and in any case it takes
a long time to store up capital, so that considering the shortness
of life a piece of extravagance may never be corrected. But a
peasant’s material wealth comes from the soil ; he therefore
knows that if he is wasteful one year the summer and autumn
will bring him replenishment, and even the hazard of drought
and frost and flood does not amount to anything so threatening
as the immense discrepancy between capital and income, the
enormous amount that has to be saved for a competency. So
even a rich and lavish man may be more uneasy in his mind

476 BLACK LAMB AND GREY FALCON

about expenditure than a very poor and economical peasant.
And I fancy that therefore all of us in the Western world know
an instinct to skimp our emotional expenditure which the peasant
has not. It is true therefore that my feeling that Angela and the
waiters and the nurses were doing something wrong in crying
round your bed has no logical basis at all, and is a stupid trans-
ference and confusion.” “ Yet there are practical conveniences,”
I said, “ because in towns we could not cry out and wail and
weep as one could in a village. Think how strangers to Paris
feel it the most frightening of towns instead of the least,
simply because Parisians quarrel and grieve exactly as they
would if they were the inhabitants of some hamlet of thirty
houses, and the cries echo back from the tall houses and the
pavements, exaggerated to the intensity of hell.”

The telephone rang and my husband answered it. Putting it
down, he said, ” Constantine's wife is coming up to see us.”
1 sat down at the dressing-table and began to powder my face,
but my eye was caught by the view from the window. Belgrade
straggles over a ridge between the Danube and its tributary the
Sava, and the Hotel of the Serbian King is high on that ridge,
so between the blocks of the fiats and houses on the opposite
side of the street I looked at the flat plate of the floods. The
waiter who had come to take away our breakfast tray followed
the line of my eye and said, “ Yes, it is unfortunate, you will
be able to have no fresh caviare, for while the river is high they
cannot get it." My husband exclaimed, “ What! do you get
caviare here ? ” " You had better ask,” the waiter replied,

" where else can you get it ? It is well known that Serbian
caviare is the best in the world.”

When he had gone we rejoiced at this patriotic remark and
I at last remembered to show my husband a verse I found
quoted in a book by a Serbian author called Mitchitch :

Le ciel serbe est couleur d’azur

Au dedans est assis un vrai dieu serbe

Entour^ des anges serbes aux voix pures

Qui chantent la gloire de leur race superbe.

We were laughing over this when Gerda came in, and we
repeated it to her. She smiled and said, " So you have got
over your liking for the Serbs ? ” " Not at all,” I said. “ But
it is stupid to be like that,” she said, " you cannot like people

SERBIA

477

who are stupid.” ” Yes, we can,” said my husband, with an
air of quietly asserting our rights.

It did not seem possible to carry on this conversation on
fruitful lines, so we spoke of other things : and presently,
according to a charming German custom, she rose from her
seat and shook hands with me in thanks for a handbag I had
sent her from London some time before. Then we showed her
some things we had bought in Bosnia, a Persian tile picture of
a prince on his white horse, delicately holding out a fruit to
a bird that delicately received it with his beak, in the most
delicate of landscapes, and my coat of cloth of gold ; and it
was all very agreeable. We were lifted for a moment into that
state of specifically German contentment that I had remarked
in Gerda at the station, in which my husband was perfectly at
ease, from sheer habit, since he had lived so much in Germany,
but in which I am acutely uncomfortable, as I do not under-
stand its basis and I feared I might put my foot through it at
any moment. Its basis, on this occasion I think, was a sense
that we were a group of the elect, connoisseurs of objects which
many people would not at all appreciate, and able at the minute
to command leisure for our enjoyment. She looked happy and
much younger, and I remembered Constantine's boasting of her
beauty. Suddenly I remembered friendship and how beautiful
it is, in a way that is difficult in London or any capital where
one suffers from an excess of relationships, and I realised that
it was probably a great comfort for this German woman, so far
from home, to talk with my husband, whose German is like a
German’s and of her own kind, for he learned it in Hamburg
and she was of Bremen.

These thoughts made me say, next time there was a pause,
" It was very pleasant in Sarajevo to see how many friends
Constantine had, and how much they loved him.” But Gerda
made no answer. My husband thought she had not heard, and
began to enumerate the families and individuals we had met
in Bosnia, and the affectionate things they had said of Con-
stantine to us. She remained perfectly impassive, so impassive
that it seemed as if she was perhaps hiding some painful emotion ;
and my husband, afraid lest she had some idea that these friends
of Constantine’s were not friendly to her, said, " And those who
had met you spoke very regretfully because they had not seen
more of you.” He told her truthfully that the Bulbul’s father

478 BLACK LAMB AND GREY FALCON

and mother, who had entertained Gerda at Travnik when Con-
stantine and she came to Bosnia on their honeymoon, had asked
after her with a special warmth. Gerda shrugged her shoulders
and said, " I cannot remember them.” “ What a pity I ” I ex-
claimed, “ they are such a wonderful pair," but before I could
say very much about them she interrupted me, by asking coldly
and wearily as if I had been talking for a long time about some-
thing I should have known would bore her, “ It is twelve years
ago since I saw these people, how can I possibly be interested
in them 7 " Impatiently she made arrangements that we should
visit her for tea that afternoon, and soon after rose and left.

” I do not understand that,” said my husband later, as we
walked out of the hotel towards the park that lies beside it, the
Kalemegdan, which is the special glory of Belgrade and indeed
one of the most beautiful parks in the world. “ Usually a wife
or husband is delighted, if only for superficial and worldly
reasons, when the other partner has many friends. Unless of
course there is hatred between them. Do you think Gerda
perhaps really hates Constantine ? " “I do not know,” I said.
“ Constantine thinks that she adores him. She certainly gives
you the impression she would adore her husband if she could,
and Constantine certainly adores her." “ I have it ! ” exclaimed
my husband. “ Most of the people I mentioned were Jews.
What an odd, what an allusive thing it is to be a German nowa-
days." " It is like asthma,” I said. “ Suddenly they begin to
strangle spiritually, and you have to remember it is because
they are allergic to Jews. But there is more than that to it. She
was happy with us, together we formed a group of people who
were like the groups who are approved in her own country.
Suddenly by talking of Constantine’s friends we deserted the
camp and went over to the enemy, we took sides with the Jews
and the Slavs who are constantly afflicting her with their
strangeness, who make up the bitterness of her exile.” “ Yes,
but it is a pity she does not fit her emotions better into the frame-
work of society,” said my husband, " for surely she would bring
no other accusation against the Jews and the Slavs than that
they do not fit into the framework of society. But it does not
matter, she is probably a very nice woman and has many good
points.”

But now we were in the park, and its charm was separating
us from everything outside it, as good parks should do. We

SERBIA

479

went through an area which is common to all parks, no matter
where they may be, where nurses watch their children play
among lilac bushes and little ponds and the busts of the de-
parted nearly great, whose living prototypes sit beside the
nurses on the benches, writing, or reading in books taken out
of shiny leather portfolios. Then there is a finely laid-out flower
garden, with a tremendous and very beautiful statue to the
Prench who died in Yugoslavia during the Great War, by
Mestrovitch, showing a figure bathing in a sea of courage.
Many people might like it taken away and replaced by a gentler
marble. But the pleasantness of this park is such an innova-
tion that it has hardly earned the right to put all grimness from
its gates. For this is the old fortress of Belgrade, which till the
end of the Great War knew peace only as a dream.

Ever since there were men in this region this promontory
must have meant life to those that held it, death to those that
lost it. Its prow juts out between the two great rivers and looks
eastward over the great Pannonian Plain (superb words, the
flattest I know) that spreads across Hungary towards Central
Europe. Behind it is the security of broken country and forest.
Here, certainly not to begin at the beginning, the Illyrians made
a stand against the Romans and were driven out. Here the
Romans made a stand against the Huns and the Avars, and
were driven out. Here the Slavs joined the Huns and were
oppressed by them, and for a brief space enjoyed peace under
the Byzantines, but were submerged by the Hungarians, until
war between Byzantium and Hungary brought a victorious
Greek army to the foot of this rock. Then the Serbs came, and
knew imperial glory under the Nemanya dynasty ; here the
petty Serbian kings who had failed to uphold that glory made
their last stand before the Turks. But the Hungarians, with
typical Christian frivolity, claimed it for nearly a hundred years,
harrying the Serbs so that they could not beat back the Turkish
army. Hence Belgrade fell to Suleiman the Great in 1521. The
Hungarians paid their scot five years later, when the Turks
beat them at Mohacs and kept them in servitude for a hundred
and fifty years. Then the tide turned, the maniac Vizier Kara
Mustapha was defeated outside Vienna and brought to this very
place to be strangled. Then in 1688 the Austrians swept them
out and took the fortress, but lost it two years later, and it was
not retaken till Prince Eugene of Savoy came dovm on it in 1717.

48o black lamb AND GRBY FALCON

So far the history of Belgrade, like many other passages in
the life of Europe, makes one wonder what the human race has
lost by its habit of bleeding itself like a mad medieval surgeon.
But it may be that not much has been wasted which we miss.
Those that are preserved to unfold the buds of their being often
produce very repulsive blossoms. In 1739 by a hideously
treacherous agreement the Austrians handed Belgrade and its
Serb inhabitants to Turkey. This was, however, not such a
calamity for the Serbs as appears, for they had been so oppres-
sively governed by the Austrians that many had already fled
into Turkish territory, though the treatment they received there
could be described not as good, but better.

In 1792, however, the Austrians conferred some benefits on
the Serbs by a treaty which they had designed simply for their
own security. They arranged that no Janissaries should be
admitted to the garrison of Belgrade or any other Serbian
town. This was to save the Austrians from a frontier that could
immediately become aggressive in time of war, it virtually im-
posed a no-man's-land. But to the Serbs it meant liberation
from the unchecked tyranny of the dominant military caste. In
the next few years the Belgrade Pashalik became happy and
prosperous under Hadji Mustapha Pasha, one of the few Turks
who ever showed signs of a talent for colonial administration.
He was so much beloved by his Christians that he was known
as " the Mother of Serbs ”, an odd title for an intensely military
people to bestow on the bearded representative of another. But
there was a shift in palace politics far away in Constantinople,
and the treaty was annulled. The Janissaries came back. They
stole by fraud into this fortress, murdered the wise Hadji
Mustapha, and set up a looting, murdering, raping tyranny
over the countryside.

It was against them that Karageorge, Black George, the
founder of the dynasty, a pig-farmer of genius, led his revolt
in 1804. He besieged this fortress and it was handed over to
him in 1806. He freed his whole country down to Parachin
and Krushevats, in 1810. But when Serbia became the ally
of Russia against Turkey, she was betrayed by Russian incom-
petence, and in 1813 the Turks came back to Belgrade. They
took a terrible revenge for Karageorge’s revolt. They massacred
all the men who were not quick enough to take refuge in the
Shumadiya, as it is called, the Wooded Place, the country lying

SERBIA

481

south of Belgrade which formed most of the old kingdom of
Serbia ; and they sold many of the women and children into
slavery. But later another Serbian leader arose, one Milosh
Obrenovitch, and he induced Russia to support him in a revolt
against the Ottoman Empire. It was successful. It was too
successful. Russia had not wanted Serbia to be free, but to
be absorbed into the Tsardom. But the Serbs had shown such
mettle that Belgrade could not be mistaken for anything but
the capital of a free Serbia. She was therefore cheated out
of the victory she had earned. To prevent her from being too
free she was forced to let a garrison of Turkish troops remain
in Belgrade fortress.

This led to incidents. It could not have been otherwise
And the great powers were always there to turn them, some-
times out of greed and baseness, sometimes out of sheer idiocy,
into wounds and humiliations. Their guilt can be judged from
the conduct of the English in June 1862. One evening in that
month two Turkish soldiers sitting at a fountain fell into a
dispute with a Serbian youth and killed him. In the subsequent
disorder a Serbian policeman was killed and another wounded.
This started a race riot which lasted all night. The Serbian
Cabinet and the foreign consuls and the Turkish pasha joined
together to take measures to stop it, and peace was believed
to be restored, when the garrison of the fortress suddenly opened
fire on Belgrade. For four hours the unhappy town was
bombarded. Not until the foreign consuls took the courageous
step of pitching their tents on the glacis between the town and
the fortress were the guns silenced. After this the British
Foreign Office took a step memorable in its imbecility. Lord
John Russell, without making any enquiries whatsoever, decided
that the incident had occurred because the Serbians had violated
their treaty obligations to Turkey, and he put forward the
strange suggestion that Austria should invade Serbia. For-
tunately Austria perceived that she could not choose a more
dangerous moment, and sent no troops. It is a relief to re-
member that four years later English influence induced the
Porte to withdraw from Serbia altogether. Foreign students
of our politics must be puzzled to find that this change in
attitude was due to the substitution of a Conservative for a
Liberal Government.

But this withdrawal did not yet bring peace to the fortress.

482 BLACK LAMB AND GREY FALCON

In front of it lay Hungary and Austria, greedy for it. Behind it
lay Russia, greedy for it. Both wanted to snatch the Balkans
from the hands of the dying Ottoman Empire. When the
young Serbian state tried to placate Austria, Russia raged.
In its rage it financed the Bulgars to turn against the Serbs,
filling them with hopes of Balkan ascendancy which have ever
since complicated and embittered the international situation.
Later the great powers met at the Congress of Berlin and gave
Bosnia and Herzegovina to the Austrian Empire, and thereby
left Serbia helpless and humiliated. In 1905 Serbia resisted
Austrian commercial aggression by a tariff war which was
known as “ the pig war and formed a customs Anschluss
with the Bulgars. So Austria’s hatred for Serbia grew day by
day, till in 1914 Princip's bullet acted as a catalytic to Central
European passions, and the Austrian monitors bombarded the
fortress from the Danube. In 191$ it was occupied by Austrian
troops, not to be freed until 1918. Now its ramparts and glacis
shelter in their mellow bluish-rose brickwork a sequence of
little flower-gardens, which stuff the old ravelins and redoubts
with pansies and tulips and forget-me-nots. It is the prettiest
and most courageous piece of optimism I know : but for all
that I think the Yugoslavs wise to have Mestrovitch’s statue
by, to remind them of the imbecile ferocity of their kind.

There is another statue by Mestrovitch in Kalemegdan. It
is the war memorial of Yugoslavia itself, the glorious naked
figure. It can only be seen imperfectly, it stands on the very
top of a column, at the prow of the promontory, high up above
the waters, which it faces ; on the park it turns its back, and
that is all the observer can see. This is not according to the
intention of the sculptor, nor is it a sacrifice made to symbolism,
though it is very apt that the Yugoslavian military spirit should
look out in vigilance and warning towards Hungary and
Austria. It happens that the statue is recognisably male, so the
municipality of Belgrade refused to set it up in the streets of the
town, on the ground that it would offend female modesty. But
the Serb is not only a peasant in prudery, he is an artist, he has
some knowledge of handicrafts, so he saw that it was natural
for a man cutting out the shape of a man to cut out the true
shape of a man ; the councillors felt therefore no Puritan hatred
of the statue, and their peasant thrift told them that it would be
wicked waste to throw away a statue well carved in expensive

SERBIA 483

material by an acknowledged master. So up it went, buttocks to
the fore.

And beautiful it looked, outlined against the landscape,
which lay under the floods as a human being in a bath ; the
face of the land, its trees and houses, were above the water,
but the body was wholly submerged. These floods were even
threatening the low platform that lies below the slope which
drops, purple with lilacs, from the prow of Kalemegdan. But
the low grey barracks down there were still occupied ; on the
nacreous surface of an exercise-ground there walked in twos
and threes a number of soldiers wearing round Cossack caps
and long full-skirted coats opening over scarlet breeches. The
scene had the air of the beginning of a ballet, because each
body was so tautly sprung in its trained perfection. There
were two dovecotes in the compound, one a pleasant faded
jade-green, the other earth-brown. Sometimes some soldiers
would halt underneath one of these cotes and cry out or clap
their hands so that the doves whirred out and travelled a low
arc to a corrugated iron roof. But for the most part these
young men strolled about talking with a peculiar intensity that
was untinged by homosexuality but spoke of male friendships
more acute and adventurous than anything we know in the West.
To look at them was to understand the military conspiracies
that have been the special difficulty of Serbia during the last
fifty years.

By now the surface of the floods was hacked into choppy
waves, which became a coarse trembling silver where the sun-
light pierced the grey-violet clouds. We shuddered and took
refuge in the fortress. It is immense. It is shaped by the
Oriental tradition which obliged a ruler to symbolise his great-
ness by the size of his habitation. Some of it the Yugoslav
Government has not yet had time or money to take in hand. A
labyrinth of corridors and cells is as the Turks left it seventy
years ago ; but in other parts there are arsenals, barracks, offices,
tennis-courts, and a museum which holds, as a grisly and
suspicious exhibit, the automobile in which King Alexander
was assassinated at Marseilles. It is not to be comprehended
why the French authorities let it leave the country. It is an old-
fashioned vehicle, seven years old in 1934 clumsily refitted
with new coachwork after a smash, which had actually been used
for the transport of better-class criminals. The French chauffeur

484 BLACK LAMB AND GREY FALCON

is known to have protested against being made t^ drive a king
in such a piece of old iron. It is right that the automobile
should be in Belgrade, for it beautifully symbolises the way
the Western powers have dealt with the Balkans. There also,
in the landward ramparts, is a charming zoo of the Whipsnade
sort. Grey skies bring out the colour of flowers and animals :
a lion and lioness drinking at a stream shone like topazes. But
it was no use, the day was growing colder, we went back to our
hotel.

Belgrade II

We ate too large a lunch, as is apt to be one’s habit in
Belgrade, if one is man enough to stand up to peasant food
made luxurious by urban lavishness of supply and a Turkish
tradition of subtle and positive flavour. The soups and stews
and risottos here are as good as any 1 know. And the people at
the tables round about one come from the same kitchen ; rich
feeding, not too digestible, but not at all insipid. Some of them,
indeed, are definitely indigestible, beings of ambiguous life,
never engaged in any enterprise that is crystalline in quality.
It is said that Belgrade is the centre of the European spy
system, and it may be that some of these people are spies. One
about whom such a doubt might be harboured came up to me
while we were eating our chicken liver risotto, an Italian whom
I had last seen at a night club in Vienna. I remembered our
meeting because of his answer to my enquiry as to what he
was doing in Austria. “ I come from Spain, but I have never
good fortune," he said. " I hoped to bring here a bull-fight,
but the bull, he will not come." This did not, of course, refer
to a startling example of animal sagacity, but to the change
noticeable in the attitude of the customs officials as the animal
passed from territories where bull-fighting is done to where it is
not. The unhappy beast had started on its journey as a symbol
of life, glorious in the prospect of meeting a sacrificial death,
and ended it as something like a fallen girl, to be rescued by
bloodless humanitarians. To-day when I asked the Italian a like
question about his presence he made a more optimistic answer.
“ I am about to take up very, very great concessions,” he said.
" A pyrites mine in Bosnia ” But," I thought, " the pyrites,
he will not come."

SERBIA 4$^

This mah was an adventurer for the reason that most
Westerners turn adventurers ; he was too weak and silly to lit
into the grooves of ordinary life, to be accepted in the company
of the really important business men, the industrialists and
financiers who would take up the concessions in Bosnia if they
were worth anything, and who are also to be seen lunching at
this hotel. But the native Yugoslavs who are offering them
their country’s resources over the table seem also to be adven-
turers, though for another reason. They would deviate from
the strict pathway drawn by business necessity not because
they were too negative but too positive for daily life. They
are robust men who speak and laugh and eat and drink a great
deal, so that by early middle life they have the lined faces of
actors and are full-bodied. The vitality of these Yugoslavs
to be seen at midday in this or any other big Belgrade hotel
is in astounding contrast to any English gathering of the sort.
Englishmen, if they happen to be physically dynamic, usually
disclaim it by their manners. These Yugoslavs have never had
an ache or pain in their lives. Yet all the historical factors in-
volved should by rights have produced an opposite effect ; for
all the Yugoslavs over forty must have taken part in a military
campaign of the most appalling nature, and all adults who were
below that age had undergone as boys privations and dangers
such as never threatened French or English or German children.

I could understand why English diplomats, too often the
most delicate of a delicate class, hated being en paste among the
Balkan peoples ; but I could guess also at another reason why
they should hate it. These Yugoslavs were not only very well,
they were certain in any circumstances to act vigorously ; and
it would be impossible to foresee what form that action would
take. In the Yugoslavian villages one felt certain of the peasants’
vigour and the predictability of their conduct. They might
be intensely individual in their emotions and their expression
of them, but they would follow a tested tradition. Here one
had no such certainty. These men in the hotel dining-room
were not united by the acceptance of any common formula.
This gave them the alien and enigmatic character of wild
animals : the lion and lioness, drinking at the stream in the
Kalemegdan were not more sealed from one in their feeling
and thinking than these jolly, healthy men. I asked myself in
vain, “ What will they do ? ” And I asked myself also the more

486 BLACK LAMB AMD GREY FALCON

important question, “ What would they feel that they could not
do ? I remembered what English people who had lived in
the Balkans had told me of dishonesty and punctilio, of gross-
ness and delicacy, avarice and handsomeness, coexistent in the
same person ; of statesmen who had practised extremes in
patriotism and in peculation not at different times in their
career but on the same day ; of brutality that took torture and
bloodshed in its stride and suddenly turned to the tenderest
charity. Surely this meant that not only I, but the Yugoslavs,
were unable to answer the question. They were not yet familiar
with the circumstances of urban life. It could hardly be other-
wise, since thirty-live years ago there was not a town in Serbia
the size of Hastings. The Yugoslavs could not be blamed,
therefore, if they had not worked out a tradition of conduct
to fit those circumstances.

Urban life takes a deal of learning. We saw further evidence
of that when we went out to see the procession of children that
always on this day, April the twenty-fourth, marches through
the street along the ridge of Belgrade, to receive the blessing
of the Patriarch at the Cathedral, which is near the park. We
took up our places near the central square among a mob of
infatuated parents, and languidly kind big brothers and sisters
who were too old to walk in the procession, and bubbling and
dancing little brothers and sisters who were too young and
had for the most part been given balloons for compensation.
There was a great deal of apprehension about, for every child
had had new clothes bought for this occasion, and this worst of
springs ranged drably overhead, sometimes spilling great heavy
pennies of rain ; and the procession was forty minutes late.

All that was forgotten, however, every time one of the
children in the crowd lost grip of its balloon, and we all saw it
rise slowly, as if debating the advantages of freedom, over the
wide trench of the cleared street. Then we all laughed, and
laughed louder, when as usually happened, since the wind was
short of breath, the balloon wobbled and fell on the heads of the
crowd on the other side of the road, and was fetched back by
its baby owner. There was one such recovery which caused
great amusement. A red balloon was blown higher than any
of the others, as high as the first-floor windows, and then
travelled across the street very slowly, with jerks and hesitations,
while its owner, a little boy in a sky-blue serge coat, staggered

SBRBIA

4«7

exactly beneath it, his anxious body expressing all the con-
sternation a man might feel when the stock market is breaking.
" It’s going. It’s gone. No, it isn’t. See, it’s going to be all
right. No, there isn’t a chance.” The puce-faced old soldier
who held the line in front of us, shook and heaved, producing
laughter from some place one would never keep it unless one
was in the habit of packing things away as safely as possible.
Three schoolgirls who had been stiff in adolescent affectation,
laughed as comfortably as if they were women already.

But in spite of all this good-humour the occasion was not
as pretty as we had hoped, because the little children were so
remarkably fragile and pasty-faced. " It is perhaps because
they have been waiting so long in the cold,” suggested my
husband. But that was not the reason, for the children who
were walking briskly in the procession were just as pallid and
dull of eye and hair. " I cannot understand it ! ” I said. " Why
should the Serbs, who are so superbly healthy when they grow
up, be such weakly children ? ” A Frenchwoman standing
beside us in the crowd said primly, with that air of having put
in her thumb and taken out a plum which we in England have
not used with ease since the days of Maria Edgeworth, " It is
because they keep their children indoors all winter. You would
not believe how little they understand the importance of giving
the little ones plenty of air and exercise.” After a moment’s
complacent pause, she added, " And vegetables too. That is
another thing of which they are ignorant. The children are
given enormous quantities of meat, and some salad, yes, but
green vegetables they hardly eat at all.”

That was to say, in fact, that the Serbs had not mastered
the technique of bringing up children in town, which indeed
is hard enough to learn so far as winter is concerned. For
in the country a peasant’s child must go out into the cold, what-
ever the day be like, to help with the crops or the livestock.
It gets air and exercise without ever having the need for them
propounded. But a great deal of information has to be stated
and realised before a man and woman living in town see that it
is their duty to commit the obvious unkindness of sending a
child out into the cold for no reason at all. The matter of food
is perhaps not so urgent as the Frenchwoman alleged ; for it is
said that the paprika, with which the Serb flavours his soups
and his stews, compensates for the lack of green vegetables.

488 BLACK LAMB AND GREY FALCON

But the excess of meat is also a real injury to the child, which it
is very hard for its parents to avoid inflicting. For in the
country a peasant can eat a great deal of meat and profit by it,
and it is not easy for him when he comes to town to realise that
this source of his strength has suddenly become a danger to him.

They are learning a new technique, and the conditions of
their education are not ideal. “ What a calamity it is that the
Serbs consider it of such importance to have a great capital,”
I said to my husband ; “ think of all the new ministries, and
look at these poor teachers.” “ Unfortunately the Serbs are
perfectly right," said my husband. “ The old pre-war Belgrade
was in no way discreditable to any Serbs except those who five
hundred and fifty years ago were beaten on the field of Kossovo
and let the Turks stream north. But it was always being brought
up against her in every German or Austrian or French or English
book on the Balkans, and it was perpetually alluded to by
diplomats. But I agree with you, these teachers are a most
unhappy sight.” For just as remarkable as the pallor and
fragility of the children was the neediness of the schoolmasters
and schoolmistresses who were in charge of them.

They bore themselves with dignity, and their faces were fof
the most part thoughtful and dedicated. This was to be expected,
for the profession of teacher offers not the steady job which the
peasant longs for above all else when he leaves the soil, but
has a special heroic prestige. Before the Balkan wars all the
young bloods of both sexes with a turn for letters took teaching
diplomas and went down to Old Serbia and Macedonia, which
were still Turkish provinces. The great powers had forced
Turkey to permit the establishment of schools with foreign
staffs for the benefits of the Christians among their subjects ;
but the result was hardly what could have been expected from
such a benevolent intervention. No area since the world began
can have been at once so highly educated and so wildly un-
civilised. Macedonia was impiortant to all Europe, because a
power that got a foothold there had a chance of falling heir, by
actual occupation or by economic influence, to the territories
of the dying Ottoman Empire. So the land was covered with
schools staffed by nationalist propagandists, who, when they
hailed from the neighbouring Balkan powers, took their duties
with more than normal pedagogic ferocity. Macedonia had a
large population of Christian Slavs, who were mainly of Serb

SERBIA

489

or Bulgarian or Greek character, though they often exchanged
characters if they shifted or their districts fell under different
domination. Serbia and Bulgaria and Greece therefore all
founded schools which aimed at making the Macedonian
infants into Serbs or Bulgars or Greeks who could be counted
on to demand the transfer of the province to whatever state
had secured their adherence. Quite a number of the school-
masters and schoolmistresses in these competitive establishments
were shot, or were not shot only because they shot first. This
situation was not wholly ended by the war. Until a few years ago
the I.M.R.O., or Internal Macedonian Revolutionary Organisa-
tion, which wished to take Macedonia from Yugoslavia and make
it Bulgarian, often attacked Yugoslav schools and murdered the
staff, and yet many Serbian teachers volunteered to put in some
years of duty in the South before they settled down at home.
So the teacher in Yugoslavia is often a hero and fanatic as well
as a servant of the mind ; but as they walked along the Belgrade
streets it could easily be seen that none of them had quite
enough to eat or warm enough clothing or handsome lodgings
or all the books they needed.

It must be admitted that this city, with its starved pro-
fessional classes, its lavish governmental display and its pullula-
tion of an exploiting class, sometimes presents an unattractive
appearance. I did not like Belgrade that evening when I sat
in the hotel lounge and watched the bar fill up with high-
coloured, thick-necked, stocky little men whose black moustaches
were lustreless as ape's hair. There had been some sort of
conference upstairs in a private room, with two foreign visitors,
one pale and featureless and round, like an enormous Dutch
cheese, the other a Jew as Hitler sees Jews. I think the
dreams raised at that conference would never be realised in all
their rosiness. No party was going to be left, as the others
hoped, with the horns and the hooves as his share of the carcase.
But everybody would do pretty well, except the general public
here and in the rest of Europe, which was going to provide the
carcase. And the rest of Europe can look after itself. It has
had its opportunities, and if it has never used them to tidy up
its financial system, so much the worse for it. The heavier
offence is against Yugoslavia, a new country that has to make
its body and soul.

The extent of the damage that is done to the State by these

BLACK LAMB AND GREY FALCON

490

financial and industrial adventurers is not easy to compute. I
do not believe that it is nearly so much in terms of money as the
Yugoslavs outside Belgrade allege. The great fortunes in Yugo>
slavia come from shipping and timber, and are as legitimate as
such riches are in England or America. For the rest, there
are only sporadic and unimpressive evidences of wealth,
however gained. There may be some large villas in Bel-
grade whose owners could not explain how they came to be
able to build them ; but then there are very few large villas in
Belgrade. Nor are there many large cars, or expensive restaur-
ants, or jewellers, or furriers. It looks to me as if all the city’s
speculators absorb a much smaller proportion of their country’s
goods than England and the United States cede as a matter of
course to the City and to Wall Street. But to a community of
peasants it may well seem that such rewards for the middleman
are altogether exorbitant ; and indeed the political conse-
quences of such a privateering strain in society are altogether
disastrous for a new country.

If the politicians of a state are dominated by ideas, then
few parties form. There arc certain natural classifications
which establish themselves ; those who are for repression and
those who are for freedom, those who are for the townspeople
and those who are for the peasants, those who are for the army
and those who are for finance and industry, and so on. Some-
times these groups stand sharply defined and sometimes they
coalesce into fewer and larger groups. But there is only a
limited number of such classifications and of the combinations
that can be formed from them. But if there are a thousand
financiers and industrialists in a country, they can, especially
when they are Slavs, turn political life into a multiplicity of
small slippery bodies like a school of whitebtut. In the ten
years after the granting of the Yugoslavian constitution in 1921
twenty-five different governments held office. There is nothing
more necessary for the country than a steady agrarian policy ;
there have been as many as five Ministers of Agriculture in
thirteen months.

It was to end this gangsterish tumult that King Alexander
took the disastrous step of proclaiming a dictatorship in 1929.
This introduced what seemed to be a change for the better, but
most Yugoslavs would say that it produced no change at all,
for it ultimately put into the saddle Stoyadinovitch, who was

SERBIA

491

hated throughout the length and breadth of the country. That
hatred was extraordinarily widespread. 1 have literally never
heard any Yugoslav, except Constantine and a very simple-
minded judge from a Dalmatian town, express admiration
for him. He was hated chiefly because he was said to be a
tyrant and enemy of freedom. He was said to have suppressed
freedom of speech and freedom of the press by throwing his
opponents into jail, where they were often starved and beaten.
It is extremely difficult to weigh the justice of these accusations.
It must be conceded at once that if a man is imprisoned in
Yugoslavia he is likely to be maltreated. A bad penal tradition
has been inherited both fropi Turkey and from Austria. I have
known a most enlightened Serb official who had had the greatest
difficulty in persuading his subordinates that it was not good
form to use torture for the purpose of extracting confessions.
It added to the complexity of the situation that when they were
not torturing their prisoners they would treat them with a
fatherly kindness unknown in our Western prisons.

Whether Stoyadinovitch imprisoned many people or not
was hard for a stranger to tell. My impression was that the
regime was far more indulgent than German Naziism or Italian
Fascism. I have heard malcontents loudly abuse the Govern-
ment freely when sitting in a caft or by an open window giving
on a lane, and 1 have often received through the ordinary post
letters in which my Yugoslav friends abused the Prime Minister
and signed their names. I have been told several stories of
atrocities which on investigation turned out to be either com-
pletely untrue or exaggerated. For example, I was told in Croatia
of a Croat who had been exiled to a Macedonian town and was
forced to report to the gendarmerie every two hours ; but a pro-
Croat anti-Government Macedonian living in that town could
not trace him, and had never heard of anybody undergoing that
peculiar punishment. I was also told of a man who had been
given a long term of imprisonment for having abused Stoya-
dinovitch to his companion as they sat at dinner in a restaurant ;
but actually the magistrate had done no more than advise him
not to talk so loud next time.

But sometimes the hand of Stoyadinovitch fell very heavily
indeed. It sometimes fell vexatiously on the intellectuals. I
have known of a provincial lawyer of the highest character who
was sent to prison for two months for treasonable conversation

49*

BLACK LAMB AND GREY FALCON

on the evidence of an ignoble personage who had before the
war been an Austrian spy in Belgrade. The real damage done
to the intellectuals lay not in the number of such cases or the
severity of the sentences but in the insecurity arising from the
knowledge that they could happen at all. But I believe that
the hand fell with a murderous heaviness on the working
classes. An English friend of mine once came on a tragic party
of young men being sent down from a Bosnian manufacturing
town to Sarajevo by a night train. All were in irons. The
gendarmes told him that they were Communists. I expect they
were nothing of the sort. Real Marxian Communism is rare in
Yugoslavia, for it is not attractive jo a nation of peasant pro-
prietors and the Comintern wastes little time and energy in this
field, but the word is extended to cover the mildest of Left
activities. These young men had probably done nothing worse
than try to form a trade union. It was against such as these,
I believe, that the Stoyadinovitch rdgime brought up its full
forces.

Consideration of this bias brought one to the reason that
the more serious-minded among the Yugoslavs gave for their
hatred of Stoyadinovitch. They knew that their abominable
prison system could not be reformed in a moment, they knew
that they were often difficult and ungracious under government.
But they could not forgive him for representing the thick-
necked, plundering little men in the bar. Those men were
his allies, and they were united against the rest of Yugoslavia.
They were against the peasants, against the starving school-
masters, against the workmen who had been brought to town
and poverty like lambs to the slaughter.

It is plausible, yet I do not think it is true. Certainly Stoya-
dinovitch represented the financial and industrial interests of
Belgrade, but he may not have meant to be his country’s enemy.
I have known Englishmen and Frenchmen who have done
business with him, and they all received honest, even handsome
treatment at his hands, which seemed to be part of a certain
Augustan attitude, hardly consonant with carelessness for his
country’s interest. The truth was, I suspect, that he was
astonishingly naive, and that his naivete was cut to an old-
fashioned pattern. The clue to that was supplied every evening
to anybody who would listen to it by the radio. The Yugo-
slavian news bulletins had in 1937 certain peculiarities. There

SERBIA

493

was very little given out about the boy King and his mother.
Queen Mariya : there was far more to be heard about the
Regent, Prince Paul, and his family. This was a great mistake.
I believe that it was the result of a very proper desire to give young
King Peter some sort of an unpublicised boyhood, but it was
misinterpreted by the rural and provincial population, who con-
sidered it a sign that Prince Paul was ambitious and might wish
to usurp the throne. But there was never nearly so much about
any member of the Royal Family as there was about Mr.
Stoyadinovitch. I have never turned on the radio in Yugoslavia
without hearing a full account of everything the Prime Minister
had done on the previous day, delivered in accents that would
have been appropriate had he been a Commander-in-chief that
had just driven an invading army over the frontier.

That might be taken as just another manifestation of the
sham Caesarism which is a commonplace of our age ; and,
indeed, towards the end of Stoyadinovitch’s regime he had the
unhappy notion of packing his meetings with youths who
chanted, in a concert that was most uncharacteristic of the
Slav, " Vodju ! Vodju ! Vodju ! ” As it might be, Fiihrer J
Fiihrer ! Fiihrer 1 " But there was a difference. Here we
had a relic of the pre-Caesarian age that has passed from the
rest of Europe. “ Mr. Stoyadinovitch,” Constantine once said
to me, ” admires capitalism.” “ Admires capitalism ? ” I
echoed, " why, how can he do that ? Capitalism is an attempt at
solving the problem of how man shall get a steady living off an
earth that does not care a jot for him, and it may be said, until
some Communist state has worked out its theory with better
results than Russia, that we know of none more successful. But
surely it is nothing like as good as what we want for ourselves,
surely it can only be regarded with disappointment, not ad-
miration.” “ So you think,” said Constantine, *' but so does
not Mr. Stoyadinovitch. He knows that we are a poor country,
since the Turks have taken all for five centuries, and he thinks
it would be beautiful if much foreign money came here and bred
more money, and if we had many factories such as they have
in America, splendid white palaces full of machinery so intricate
that when it moves it is like symphonies being played in steel,
pouring out new and clean things for our people, pouring out
golden streams of wages that all could be bought.” “ But
sometimes money does not breed,” I said, ” sometimes it dies

494 BLACK LAMB AND GREY FALCON

in childbirth, and the community is left with a whole lot of
corpses on hand. And as for such factories, they may look
like palaces but the people who work inside could never be taken
for princes and princesses, and the stream of wages, which is
golden in the same sense that the Danube is blue, often washes
them back in the evenings to filthy slums.” “ You are a woman,
you want all to be pretty,” said Constantine, “ you do not see
the beauty of ruthlessness, and as for money, Mr. Stoyadino-
vitch is a very clever man. He would see that there are no de-
pressions as there have been in America."

There is something here, touching in its inexperience, which
is very different from Fascism or Naziism. Mussolini and
Hitler came to power because they offered the victims of capital-
ism a promise of relief by a magical rite of regimentation. But
this is an innocent who does not know that such victims can
ever be numerous enough to exercise a determining force in
society. He thinks of them as failures, as weak and impotent,
and so they may be in their pereonal lives ; but if they form a
seething and desperate mass they may develop a dynamic power
surpassing that engendered by success. Under this delusion he
conducts himself with an extraordinary imprudence. He does
not understand that it is wise to allow as many of the failures as
possible to convert themselves by organisation to something
more like success, and so he fails — and in this he resembles many
members of the propertied classes both in England and America
— to luiderstand that trade unionism is not a disintegrating but
a stabilising force.

How should such men as these in the bar know otherwise ?
When the industrial revolution had dawned on the Western
powers, the Serbs were Turkish slaves ; to this day eighty-seven
per cent of Yugoslavs are agricultural workers ; Leskovats is
called the Manchester of Yugoslavia and is no such thing, but a
pleasant good-weathered little town of under twenty thousand
inhabitants who have no difficulty in keeping their faces clean ;
never has Belgrade known a time when, from the uplifting
windows of sky-scraper hotels it does not possess, ruined bankers
dropped like the gentle dew from heaven upon the place beneath.
It may be asked why these adventurers might not have learned
of the inconveniences of capitalism from books and newspapers.
Certain mistakes the printed word never kept anyone from com-
mitting. Manon Lescaut never deterred a man from loving a

SERBIA

495

whore, no ageing woman sent away a young lover because she
had read Bel Ami. There exists a mountain of economic publi-
cations which prove that in otir modern world of shrinking
markets and increasing production it would be impossible to
found John Company ; the Germans plan to draw such wealth
from colonial expansion.

I felt a rush of dislike towards the men in the bar who were
instruments of this error. I detected in them a strong physical
resemblance to certain types found in Western cities during the
last century, to pictures representing the financial adventurers
who dominated Paris under the Second Empire, to the photo-
graphs of City men which can be seen in the illustrated papers
of the nineties, named as founders of enterprises not now extant.
Idiotically, they were not only copying a system that was far
from ideal, they were themselves imitating those who had proved
incapable of grasping such success as the system offers. I could
imagine the hotel making the same error. It would repudiate
its good fat risottos, its stews would be guiltless of the spreading
red oil of paprika, it would employ chamber-maids who would
not howl by the beds of ailing clients and whose muzzles would
not twitch in animal certainty before a Greek, in doubt before
a Finn. It would not then resemble a good French hotel, it
would become international, a tethered wagon-lit, like the large
Spanish hotels.

Belgrade, I thought, had made the same error. It had till
recently been a Balkan village. That has its character, of
resistance, of determined survival, of martyred penury. This
was a very sacred Balkan village ; the promontory on which it
stood had been sanctified by the blood of men who had died
making the simple demand that, since their kind had been
created, it might have leave to live. Modern Belgrade has
striped that promontory with streets that had already been
built elsewhere much better. I felt a sudden abatement of my
infatuation for Yugoslavia. I had been enchanted on my first
visit with the lovely nature and artifice of Bosnia, and I had
recognised in Macedonia a uniquely beautify! life of the people.
When the Macedonians loved or sang or worshipped God or
watched their sheep, they brought to the business in hand poetic
minds that would not believe in appearances and probed them
for reality, that possessed as a birthright that quality which
Keats believed to be above all others in forming a “Man of

496 BLACK LAMB AND GREY FALCON

Achievement, especially in Literature, and which Shakespeare
possessed so enormously “ Negative Capability ", he called
it, and it made a man “ capable of being in uncertainties,
doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason
But Macedonia had been under the Ottoman Empire until 1913,
it had till then been stabilised by Turkish misgovernment in
precisely those medieval conditions which had existed when it
was isolated by her defeat at Kossovo in 1389. Macedonia
should perhaps be looked on as a museum, not typical of the
life outside it. It had only had twenty-five years of contact
with the modern world. Serbia had known no such seclusion.
It was liberated in 1815. For a century it had been exposed to
the peculiar poisons of the nineteenth century. I had perhaps
come a long way to see a sunset which was fading under my
eyes before a night of dirty weather.

But some of this threatened degeneration was still a long
way from consummation. This hotel may have longed to slip
off its robust character and emulate the Savoy and the Crillon
and the Plaza ; but its attempt was not well under way as yet.
A newcomer had arrived in the bar ; the stocky little men were
now greeting with cries of love and trust another of the kind who
would have betrayed them for about the sum that would have
made them betray him, lifting their glasses to him and slapping
him on the back with the exaggeration of children playing the
game “ in the manner of the word That I might have seen
in London or Paris or New York. But in none of those great
cities have I seen hotel doors slowly swing open to admit, un-
hurried and at ease, a peasant holding a black lamb in his arms.
He took up his place beside the news-stand where they sold
Pravda and Politika, the Continental Daily Mail, Paris Soir,
the New York Herald-Tribune. He was a well-built young
man with straight fair hair, high cheek-bones, and look of
clear sight. His suit was in the Western fashion, but he wore
also a sheepskin jacket, a round black cap and leather sandals
with upturned toes; and to his ready-made shirt his mother
had added some embroidery. He looked about him as if in
search of someone. Twice he went to the door of the bar and
peered at the faces of the stocky little men, so it was plain
that he was waiting for one of their kind ; and indeed the
middle class in Yugoslavia is so near to its peasant origin that
any of them might have had such a cousin or nephew. But the

SERBIA

497

one he sought was not there, so he went back to his place by
the news-stand. He stood still as a Byzantine king in a fresco,
while the black lamb twisted and writhed in the Arm cradle
of his arms, its eyes sometimes catching the light as it turned
and shining like small luminous plates.

Topola

As arranged we called the next morning at Constantine’s
house ready to go with Gerda to see the half-finished Monument
to the Unknown Soldier on the hill of Avala, twelve miles from
Belgrade, and the Karageorgevitch Mausoleum on the hill of
Oplenats. The expedition began badly. Gerda opened the
door in trim, fresh clothes and was formally welcoming us in the
hall when Constantine’s old mother slipped in. Her mouth
had suddenly watered for some kind of food, so she had tied a
kerchief round her head and gone along to the market in her
wrapper and slippers, and she had hoped to get back into the
house without anybody being the wiser. But here we all were,
being hochwohlgeboren in the passage. So Gerda looked at the
floor with the air of blushing for shame, though her skin did
not in fact show any alteration at all, and the poor old mother
hung her Beethovenish head. This was all quite wrong, for
she was really a magnificent pianist, and Balzac’s dressing-
gown is the one garment all artists have in common. One
cannot create -without a little sluttishness packed away some-
where. Neatness and order are delicious in themselves, but
permissible only to the surgeon or the nurse. Schiller knew
that when he kept rotting apples in his writing-desk, and opened
the drawer when he needed inspiration, so that he could look
on their brownness, inhale the breath of over-ripeness.

But Gerda had not been able to coerce Constantine. Shame-
lessly he called us into his study, and we found him fat and
round and curly in his candy-striped pyjamas and dressing-
gown, with little bouquets of black hair showing between his
jacket buttons. “ Ah, she is your girl too," said my husband,
pointing to the photograph over Constantine’s desk, which
represented the Ludovisi triptych of Venus rising from the
foam. “ And why not ? ’’ said Constantine ; “ she is per-
fect, for what she is and what she is not. There is nothing

498 BLACK LAMB AND GREY FALCON

in her pose of patriotism or propaganda or philosophy or
religion, simply she says, ' I am rising to delight ” His little
fat hands paddled in the air, lifting him through the same tide
as Venus, to the same sweet enamoured air. He, who is one
of the ugliest of human beings, knows intuitively all that it is
to be the goddess of beauty. " That sculpture is the very
opposite of the frescoes that you have seen in South Serbia,
that your husband will see in the mosaic copies that King
Alexander made for the mausoleum at Topola. For there is no
delight, it is all patriotism and propaganda and philosophy and
religion, but all the same there is rising, there is floating, there
is an ecstasy, but it is a terrible one.” His mouth was full of
bread and coffee, but his hands paddled, and he rose up a beam
of white light to a light that was whiter.

“ You are an intelligent man, though you are a banker,”
he said to my husband, “ so you will make no error at Oplenats,
you will take these mosaics as an indication of what you will
see in Macedonia, in South Serbia, not for themselves. All the
Macedonian frescoes are painted, and these have been copied
in mosaic. A painted fresco is a painted fresco and a mosaic
fresco is a mosaic fresco, and a fresco that is meant to be painted
and is worked in mosaic is a mongrel, and mongrels should be gay
little dogs, not very large works of art. I suffered the tortures
of the damned when I was in Germany and must arrange all
for our King with the German manufacturer of mosaics, but I
must own it was not only because of my artistic conscience, it
was also because the manufacturer was the slowest man in the
world. A tall, fat man he was with a great beard, and he
spoke so . . . and so . . . and so . . . and once I could not
help myself ; I cried out, ‘ Mein Herr, will you not speak a little
faster, for I have many things to do,’ and he answered, very
angrily, but still very slowly, ‘ No, I cannot speak fast, for in
the mosaic business we do all things very slowly, we make for
eternity.’ But you will see what he made. I am not sure that
it was for eternity, I think it was only for ever, which is not at
all the same.”

On the porch he said, “ It is fine weather, and it will be
fine weather to-morrow; I am so glad that to-morrow we go
to the Frushka Gora. That I have not told you about : there are
some old monasteries of our people on some hills by the Danube,
that are called the Frushka Gora, that is the Frankish Hills;

SERBIA

499

they are very pretty in themselves, and they explain Belgrade
and all that you will see to-day.” So we drove off along the
boulevards, which were crowded with leisurely people, for it was
Sunday and even those who had come to the market were taking
it easy. For the same reason there were boys lolling at the open
windows of the University Students’ Hostel, in the lovely cat-like
laziness only possible to highly exercised youth. From one
window a boy, darker and more iiery than the rest, was leaning
forward and making a burlesque harangue to a laughing group,
who raised their hands and cried in mocking hatred, “ Long live
Stoyadinovitch I ” Of such are the students whom the news-
papers often describe as Communists, and a number of them
would claim that title. Yet to Westerners nothing could be less
accurate. These people are peasants who have in a sense
enjoyed an unusual amount of class freedom. They were serfs
only to the Turks, who were alien conquerors, and have not for
centuries been subordinate to large landowners of their own
blood, so they find it natural to criticise such of themselves as set
up to be governors. Since they are South Slavs, they have never
had a Peter the Great or Catherine the Great to teach them
obedience to a centralised power. If they were to rebel against the
Government they would act in. small independent groups, as
Princip and Chabrinovitch did, they would never joyously be-
come subordinate atoms in a vast Marxist system. When they
say they are Communists they mean that they are for the country
against the town, for the village against Belgrade, for the
peasant against the industrialist ; and for that reason they one
and all loathed Stoyadinovitch.

We were out of Belgrade, we were driving to the dark cone
of distant Avala across a rolling countryside that was the spit
and image of Lowland Scotland, though richer to the eye by
reason of the redness of the earth. It bears signs of comfortable
peasant proprietorship, and there came into my mind the
verdict my Proven5al cook had passed on a certain village on the
C6te des Maures : “ C’est un bon pays ; personne n’est riche
la-bas mais tout le monde a des biens.” Fairer words cannot be
spoken of a country, in my opinion ; and I felt in great good
humour. So, too, I was delighted to find, did Gerda. Her face
was serene and she was making conventional German Small-
talk with my husband, and she was plainly passing through a
specifically German experience which has always struck me as

500 BLACK LAMB AND GREY FALCON

charming. Its simplest form is often displayed in old-fashioned
German children’s books. Little girls arrive in a coach at a
Cologne hotel, with their hearts singing like birds within them :
" Our papa,” rises their carol, “ is a Herr Geheimrath from
Hanover, our mama is everything a Frau Geheimrath should
be, we are two well-behaved little girls, wearing beautiful new
travelling ulsters, and we are going to see the Rhineland, which
everybody knows is one of the most beautiful sights in the world,
and all, all is heavenly.” Neither the French nor the English
ever get quite the same naive, unpresumptuous joy in what one
is and what one does, when both are unremarkable. We may
rejoice in what we do, but we are too Augustinian not to detest
what we are, or not to pretend such detestation. It pleased me
enormously that Gerda was saying to herself as she drove along,
“ I come of an old family of Lutheran pastors, I am the wife
of a Yugoslavian official, I am accompanying an Englishman,
a cultured person and graduate of Oxford University and a
banker, and his wife, who is a writer, and we are going to see
two interesting Denkmals, and it is a fine day.”

The road swung round and round the cone of Avala, running
between woodlands, green with their first leaves and bronze
with buds and carpeted with blue periwinkles. We got out
and climbed to the summit over the unfinished gauntness of the
engineering construction which is to support the vast Mestrovitch
memorial. At the very top we halted, embarrassed by an
unusual view of the fighting male. On the descending slope
beyond stood two rows of soldiers, one facing the other, every
man of them holding in his hand something that flashed. An
officer cried out a word of command, which roared from his
throat like a spell designed for the instant precipitation of an
ocean of blood. The soldiers raised to their lips the things that
flashed, which were tin mugs, and we heard a strange sound
which might have been made by birds singing underground.
Then the officer cried out for atrocity again, and a jet of liquid,
silver in the sunlight, spurted from each soldier’s lips. They
were doing gargling drill against influenza. They saw us, but
showed no signs of self-consciousness. If the Serbian heroes
of old had been ordered by their Tsars to gargle in front of
female tourists they would have obeyed. Military service
appears to be the only thing that makes a Slav calm. The
difference between the students we had seen at the windows of

SERBIA

SOI

the University Hostel and these soldiers was that which might
be remarked in France between the girl pupils of a lycie,
gadding and gossiping their way home through the streets of a
provincial town, and the still and stylised products of an
extremely expensive convent school.

We went down the hill again and paused beside a model
of the Mestrovitch memorial which was mounted on a truck.
The roof of the tomb is to be supported by immense calm
caryatides, Serbian peasant women, the mothers of these calm
boys. We looked at the existing memorial, which is rough and
small, cut by some simple mason, and out of curiosity I put my
head into a little hut beside it. 1 wished I had not. It housed
the wreaths that had been laid on the memorial by various
official bodies. Through its gloom immortelles and ribbons
lettered with gold and striped with crude national colours
emitted the nostril-stopping smell of dust. By reason of the
words spelled out by gold letters and the combinations of the
national colours, the spectacle was horrifying. These wreaths
were displeasing in any case because they were official and had
been ordered by preoccupied functionaries and supplied as
articles of commerce for a minor state occasion that would
provoke no wave of real feeling in the people, but their proven-
ance reminded one that the quality of Balkan history, and indeed
of all history, is disgusting.

One wreath had been given by Nazi Germany, which had
now absorbed the body of Austria, and which had been absorbed
by the spirit of Austria ; Vienna is speaking again, through
Hitler as through Lueger and Schoenerer and Conrad von
Hotzendorf, a message of self-infatuation and a quiver of
hatreds for all but the chosen Teutonic people, the most poison-
ous of these being dedicated to the Slav. Another had been
given by Italy, who had incessantly harried Dalmatia by her
greed, who gave the assassins of King Alexander arms and the
knowledge how to use them. It was a kind of filthy buffoonery
almost unmatched in private life which had made these powers
lay their wreath on a grave sacred to a people whom they meant
to send to its grave as soon as possible. It was an indictment
of man that this people was forced to stand by when their enemies
came to defile their holy place, simply because no political ar-
rangement has been discovered which annuls the dangers aris-
ing out of Yugoslavia’s proximity to Central Europe and Italy.

SM ' BLACK LAMB AKD 6RBY FALCON

I became filled with feminist rage. I would have liked to
deface the model of Mestrovitch's monument, which represented
peasant women without contrition. Since men are liberated
from the toil of childbirth and child-rearing, they might reason-
ably be expected to provide an environment which would give
children the possibility to survive and test the potentialities of
humanity. The degree of failure to realise that expectation
revealed in this disgusting little room could not be matched by
women unless ninety per cent of all births were miscarriages.
Gerda, however, liked the wreaths. “ Our father is a Herr
Geheimrath ...” I put out my hand and touched the Italian
offering, and murmured my distaste, but Gerda only wrinkled
her nose and laughed silly, like a little girl who sees something
that her nurse has told her is dirty.

We drove away from Avala by a pleasant road that runs
among water-meadows where willows mark the constant stream,
and orchards with plump foliage smothering the last of the
blossom, and vineyards naked and unpromising as graveyards,
with their poles stripped bare for spring. Like the Pas de Calais
this Serbian countryside presents inconsistently neat cultivations
and sluttish villages. The villages here are very large, for
except in the neighbourhood of the big towns there are no
scattered farmsteads. Wherever the peasant's land may be, he
lives in the village and drives his livestock home at night and
out again in the morning. This custom proved its convenience
during the Turkish occupation, for it enabled the Christians to
put up a combined defence against night raids by irregular troops
or bandits, but it had its origin further back than that. The basis
of the Slav social system was the Zadruga, the family whose
members shared equally in the labours and profits of a jointly
owned estate, which was governed by an elected Elder, who
was usually the oldest man in the group but might sometimes
be a younger man who had shown exceptional ability, or might
even be a woman. The Elder and his wife lived in a central
house and the others either inhabited rooms joined to it or
adjacent houses. The Zadruga naturally split up when the
number of descendants began to press too heavily on the
resources of the estate, but it usually included at least three
generations and often numbered a hundred persons or more.
The dreary identification between country life and solitude
has therefore never depressed Serbia as it has England; and

SERBIA

503

even quite insignificant villages run long main streets down a
hill and over a stream and up the hill on the other side, where
the cultivators of the trim orchards and vineyards loll outside
tumbledown cafes, looking anything but trim themselves.

They were, indeed, not out to look trim. Ferocity was this
district’s line. They would have preferred to curdle the blood,
just a little, by their manifest kinship with the Haiduks, with
the great chief Karageorge himself. For we were already on
the stage where that first liberator of Serbia had unveiled his
violence and power. At a turn of the road we stopped to see
the place where Karageorge was one day riding with his herds-
men behind his swine, just after the Janissaries had come back
to power and murdered the pro-Serb Mustapha Pasha and were
massacring every important Serb that they could find. Through
the dust he saw the flashing weapons of a party of Turkish
soldiers and without an instant's hesitation he and his herdsmen
turned their horses' heads into the oak forests that bordered the
road, leaving the swine to take care of themselves. Later we
came to the village where Karageorge had met with two Serbian
chiefs and five hundred of the rank and file, and had been
chosen their commander-in-chief in the first insurrection of 1804.
This moody and valiant giant, who was no mere springing
tiger but possessed real military genius, did not wish to accept
that office, for curious reasons which have been reported for us
by an actual witness. He said, " I want to go with you, but
not before you,” and when they pressed him for a reason he
told them, “ For one thing, you’ve not learned soldiering, and
because of that, after some days, you will surrender to the
Turks, then you know what will happen ! And for another, if I
accepted I certainly would do much not to your liking. If one
of you were taken in the smallest treachery — the least faltering,
I would kill him, hang him, punish him in the most fearful
manner.”

This was not a mere threat of disciplinary firmness ; it was
a confessional allusion to the violences which he had already
committed under the stress of patriotism. Years before, when
he was a youth, he had taken part in an uprising and had had
to flee with his stepfather and their cattle towards the Austrian
frontier. But when they came to the river Sava his stepfather’s
nerve failed him, and he announced he would turn back and
seek pardon from the Turks. Karageorge did not believe that

504 BLACK LAMB AND GREY FALCON

he would receive anything from the Turks but torture, so in
desperation he took out his pistol and shot the old man dead.
Then he went on to the next village and asked the headman to
give the corpse burial, and left him all his cattle in payment.
That Karageorge should at the moment of being chosen leader
by his people have referred to their characteristic faults and
his own, not in comfortable tones of conventional modesty but
with an unimpassioned accuracy, is characteristically Slav. But
East can meet West. The home where the three chiefs met has
been pulled down and replaced by a towered school, closely
resembling a small suburban public library.

We passed by a spa almost as unlike Bath or Vichy or
Baden-Baden as the spa we had seen in Bosnia : no fine ladies
and gentlemen were here in search of undefined recuperation,
peasants were striding down a chestnut avenue towards the
spring, solemnly conscious of what they expected its waters to do
to their bowels, solemnly conscious of what their forefathers had
known, that in water there are gods. There was a solid yet naive
Kurhaus, built by somebody who had gone to the West to see
how these things were done, and had gaped at his model as well
as studying. Since it was Sunday there were little boys offering
trays of scones and rolls, for the Serbs love breadstuffs almost
as much as the Scots ; and others were selling miniature leather
sandals of the type worn throughout Yugoslavia, with the up-
turned toe, which is useless though appropriate as a symbol of
the X which is added to the usual human characteristics in the
Slav. The evaluation of that x became an increasingly interesting
problem as we drove along the lanes into Karageorge’s village,
Topola (which is one of the two Serb words for poplar), for
there his kind stood in the mud, all with these coclupur points
to their sandals, all with that Slav mystery heavy on their
dark forelocks, across their scowling brows, hanging round
a playground that had been Karageorge’s stableyard. The
main street took us to a village green, running uphill alongside
a church with dome and walls battered and pitted with rifle-
fire, and a galleried farmhouse that had been Karageorge’s
home and now bore the emblems of a Sokol headquarters. On
a seat beneath some trees sat two parent wolves, an old man and
woman, their ferocity silvered down to gentle and amiable
dignity, emitting fire from the nostrils only now and then, finely
dressed in the sheepskin and embroidered homespun of peasant

SERBIA

S05

costume. The unknown quantity was not what one might have
thought, for mere lawlessness and savagery do not age in
majesty, with accumulated goods about them.

An old man came and took us into the church, which was
full of the dark magic of the Orthodox rite, and told us that here
Karageorge had come to take communion, and here his bones
had rested ever since they had been laid there several years after
his death, till they had been moved to the great new mausoleum
on the hill at Oplenats half a mile away. “ Where had they been
in the meantime ? " I asked. “ In the ground," said the old man,
“ in a valley not far from here. He had come back from exile
after Obrenovitch had become the leader of the Serbs, and
Obrenovitch sent a man to kill him, that he might placate the
Sultan by sending him his head. But later Obrenovitch’s wife
grew alarmed, because one of the children in her family grew
ill, and she had the bones of Karageorge dug up and sent back
to us here." Behind us in the darkness Gerda tittered. We
turned in surprise and found her looking surprisingly fair.
“ They are such savages," she explained. The old man gazed
at her perplexed, as if she might perhaps be ill or unhappy, and
went on slowly with doubtful, kindly glances at her, to show us
the screen that divides the whole altar from the church, the
iconostasis. It was carved with artless sculptures of holy stories
seen through peasant eyes, after the fashion of the fourteenth
century, although the wood was new. " They were carved for
us by three brothers,” he said, " descendants of the three
brothers who did the famous iconostasis and pulpit at the
Church of the Holy Saviour in Skoplje, two hundred years ago.
They have carried on the craft from father to son. Eight years
they lived here, making this screen. Now they have been for
many years at Nish, working on a screen that will be greater
than this, but not more beautiful. For the Karageorgevitches
they did their best.” He opened the royal door in the icono-
stasis, that opens on the altar, and his face folded with grief.
“ Here once God gave us a great mercy. When our King
Alexander went to Bulgaria we said mass here day and night
during all the three days he was in Sofia, and although there are
many Bulgarians who hate us and have evil hearts, nothing
happened to him, he came back to us in safety. But, God
forgive us, when he went to France we did not say mass for him
at all, for we thought he was among friends." Again history

5o6 black lamb and GREY FALCON

emitted its stench, which was here particularly noisome. Nothing
a wolf can do is quite so unpleasant as what can be done to a
wolf in zoos and circuses, by those who are assumed not to be
wolfish, to be the civilised curators of wolfdom.

Before we got back into the car we stood for a minute on
the green, looking at the fierce little church, at the fierce little
farmhouse out of which some fierce boys were issuing, fresh
from gymnastic exercises dynamised by patriotic fury, at the
fierce and handsome ancients on the seat. " Now I see the
truth of the old saying that there are more ways of killing a cat
tham by choking it with cream,” said my husband. ” Observe
that in Bosnia the Slavs did choke the Turk with cream, they
glutted him with their wholesale conversions and kept him
outside of Sarajevo. But here cream just did not come into
the question. The Serbs fought the Turks, and then they fought
them, and then they fought them. What we see in these people
is the normal expression to be looked for in a fighting army that
has just come out of the trenches after a long hand-to-hand
fight, and thinks it may yet be ambushed.” But later, as we
walked to the mausoleum where it lifts its white cupolas in a
wooded park, as we passed under the dry grainy gold of its
mosaic vaults, he said, “ This, however, is something else.
Has it anything to do with these people, this extraordinary
place ? Or is it just a fantasy of these Karageorgevitches ? "

The church, which is dedicated to St. George, is quite new,
and externally it is very beautiful. Fidelity to the Byzantine
tradition is responsible for quite a number of very ugly small
churches, for its reliance on pure form shows up any defects in
the way of bad machine cutting and ugly stone ; but it automati-
cally imposes a certain majesty and restraint on a church which
is given good material and skilled workmanship. Oplenats was
built by old King Peter in 1912, but it was reduced to ruins
during the Great War. In 1922 King Alexander rebuilt it, and
added two features which had, apparently, not been in his father’s
mind when he originally planned it. King Alexander brought
up the bones of Karageorge from the village church at Topola,
and buried them under a plain block of marble in the right apse :
that is to say, beside the royal throne which stands in any Ortho-
dox church of dignity, which is here an impressive matter of
green marble surmounted by a white-and-gold eagle. The only
other Karageorgevitch whom King Alexander thought worthy

SERBIA

507

to be buried in the church itself, and not in the crypt, was King
Peter, who lies under another plain block of marble in the left
apse. This indicates a critical attitude which ruling monarchs
do not usually adopt towards their dynasty : for there was
another Karageorgevitch ruler, Alexander the son of Kara-
george, but he was not a success.

The other contribution of King Alexander was the mosaics ;
King Peter planned no other decoration than the shot-riddled
regimental banners, borne in the Balkan wars and the Great
War, which hang from the marble pillars. These mosaics are
indeed at first extremely disconcerting in their artistic im-
propriety. It is not mere pedantry to object to mosaic as a
medium for copying painted frescoes, for the eye is perpetu-
ally distracted by its failure to find the conditions which the
original design was framed to satisfy. These frescoes are
Byzantine in origin : their proper title in the histories of art is
Serbo-Byzantine. The flame-like forms that should have been
fixed in appropriate tenuity by colours flame-like in their smooth-
ness and transparency, were falsified in their essence because
they were represented in a material opaque and heterogeneous
as sand. The man who ordered these mosaics to be made must
have been lacking in any fine aesthetic perception. But they
compose an extremely ably prepared encyclopaedia of medieval
Serbian art. Looking up at them one can say, “ That Dormition
of the Virgin comes from Grachanitza, that sequence of the life
of St. George comes from Dechani, that Flight into Egypt from
Petch ”, and without receiving the intense pleasure which is
given by the actual sight of these works of art, one is afforded
useful information as to what sort of pleasure that is going to be.

" But why did this man want to hold up an encyclopaedia
of medieval Serbian art over his family vault ? ” asked my
husband. ” It seems to me as if an English king should build a
mausoleum full of allusions to Richard Coeur de Lion.” " Well,
that is all the remote past they have," I said, " and they came
straight out of that glory into the misery of Turkish conquest.”
“ But is there any real continuity between the medieval Serbian
Empire and these Serbs ? ” asked my husband. " Of course
there is," I said ; “ you will see that once you get away from
Belgrade.” " But these frescoes are so beautiful,” said my
husband, " this is a true legacy from Byzantium. It is too
patently sensitive for the great period of Byzantine art, but there

5o8 black lamb AND GREY FALCON

is the right hieratic quality, the true desire to arrange all things
in an order that shall disclose a relationship between the lowest
and the highest, even God Himself.” Then a thought struck
him. " But where are these Serbo-Byzantine frescoes ? ” he
asked. " In monasteries,” I said, " some in Serbia ; some of
the most beautiful are in Studenitsa and Mileshevo and
Zhitcha, but many are in Old Serbia and in South Serbia.”
“ All on strictly Serb territory," said my husband, ” so this
building with its enormously costly mosaics can mean nothing
whatsoever to any Croatians or Dalmatians or Slovenes. Yet
it is the mausoleum of their king, and superbly appropriate to
him. I see that though Yugoslavia is a necessity it is not a
predestined harmony.”

We went towards the crypt where King Alexander himself
is buried, but the beauty of one of the frescoes caught my
husband back. ” But you never told me of this extraordinary
thing,” said my husband. “ Here is a man whom I know only
as a Balkan king with an unfortunate tendency to dictatorship.
He appears to have conceived a gloriously poetic idea, such as
only the greatest men of the world have ever had. He recovered
the ancient lands of his people in the Balkan wars and tried —
what was it Constantine once said ? — ‘to graft his dynasty ’
on the stock of their ancient emperors so that what was dead
lived again. It is quite a different idea from mere conquest.
Those frescoes say to his people, ‘ This is what you were, so
this. is what you are ’. But, tell me, was it anything more than
a pedagogic fancy ? Can those toughs we have seen outside
really respond to such an idea ? ” "I am not sure," I said,
“ but I think he got it from them.” " Nonsense," said my
husband. " I refuse to believe that those young ruffians fret
for lack of the Byzantine frescoes their ancestors enjoyed in the
fourteenth century.” " Well, I assure you they knew they had
lost something,” I said, " they all know by heart a lot of
poetry.” “ They do not look as if they did,” said my husband.
" Oh, not Arthur Hugh Clough," I said, with a bitterness that
referred to an attempt made by my husband to read me a poem
by that writer which he had declared was tolerable, " but they
know thousands of lines of folk-poetry about the defeat of the
Serbs at Kossovo, and it gives an impression of a great civilisa-
tion. I know that they tested the patients in the Serbian
military hospitals during the war to see how many knew it.

SERBIA 509

and it was something like ninety per cent.” " Maybe,” said my
husband.

In the crypt, lamps hanging above the tombs illumined long
arcades. Mosaics on the walls and vaults shook with a feeble
pulse in this uncertain light. There are numbers of Karageorge-
vitch dead lying here, and though it is only a hundred and
twenty years since Karageorge died, not a few have lain here
for many times the length of their lives. This family, though so
potent, was physically fragile. There are children, lads, young
wives in their twenties, their names all trembling with that
suggestion of weakness, headache, fever, which is given by
tremulous lamplight. A stronger brightness was shed by the
candles which blazed in an iron stand beside the grave of King
Alexander, which lies at the altar end of the crypt, under slabs
of onyx. Half a dozen men and women were lighting fresh
candles and putting them in the stand, were crossing themselves
and murmuring and kneeling and bringing their roughness
down to kiss the shining onyx ; such passion, I have heard, is
shown by Lenin’s tomb. The king lies beside his mother, as
his will directed : she died of tuberculosis when he was fifteen
months old. In this crypt, the foundation of this immense mass
of marble erected to a parricide by his descendants, the core
of this countryside on which defensive resentments grew like
thick forests, all was plaintive and wistful, tender and nostalgic.

Franzstal

Above us the day was blue and golden, as it had rarely been
during this lachrymose spring. Around us it may have been so
also, but we did not know. We were shut up in the courtyard
of an inn. There was nothing remarkable about this courtyard.
It was quite large ; the rooms round it had a certain cosy
quality, not at all Slav, as if they were built for a congestion
which would not be at all contentious, but warm and animal
and agreeable ; on a line across the courtyard hung scarlet
blankets and white sheets and towels embroidered in red cross-
stitch ; in flower-beds running by the walls prinuoses and tulips
grew with an amusing stiffness. All that was worth seeing there
could be seen in ten seconds.

Hor was this inn set in an interesting place. Outside there

$10 BLACK LAMB AND GREY FALCON

was a village consisting of one very broad and muddy street,
lined with one-storeyed houses and shops. Sometimes a light
cart passed, drawn by a mare with her foal running alongside,
harnessed outside the poles ; so do they accustom horses to the
traffic from the beginning. Sometimes a herd of dirty and
ill-tailored pigs roamed by, apparently free from all governance.
There was really no reason to pay a visit to such a village,
particularly on a Monday afternoon, when none of the popula-
tion was visible to display such interesting characteristics as
they possessed.

Nor was it for the food that we had come to this inn. On
the table in front of the four of us, Gerda, Constantine, my
husband and myself, there were stacked platefuls of long un-
dulant sausages that can never have been good specimens of
their kind, that were particularly unpleasant at the moment,
for they were neither quite warm nor quite cold. The liver
sausage was peculiarly horrible, and left a layer of grease on
the lips and palate.

My husband and I were not even there because we had made
a mistake, and had been deceived by our ignorance of the country
into believing that this village was interesting. We had not
wished to come at all. It had been announced to us that we
should. The evening before, on our return from Topola, we had
been sitting at dinner in our hotel, uneasily discussing Gerda.
During the day’s expedition she had shown that she was dis-
appointed with us. When we showed admiration or curiosity
about Serbian things she behaved as if we were letting her down
and betraying some standards which we should have held in
common : as an exceptionally stupid Englishman might behave
in India to tourists who showed an interest in native art or philo-
sophy. “But she is worse than that,” said my husband. "She said
something to me this afternoon when you were making a sketch
of the church at Topola which seemed to me profoundly shocking.
She told me that the Serbs hold that the Austrians had no right
to bombard Belgrade, as it was an unfortified town, and I could
not understand whether this was just an attitude of the people
or a serious opinion of informed men. So I asked, ‘ Does your
husband think so ? ' She gave a queer, sly smile and said, ‘ Yes,
he would say so, but then he is a good official.’ That seemed to
me the most utterly undisciplined and disloyal thing that the
foreign-bom wife of an official could possibly say.” It was then

SERBIA

Sii

that a waiter came to announce a telephone call from Con>
stantine. When my husband came back he said, " Constantine
tells me we will not be going to the Frushka Gora to-morrow,
but the day after. To-morrow he wants us to go and have lunch
at a place called Franzstal.” “ Franzstal ? Why Franzstal ? ”
I said. “ It is a suburb inhabited by the Schwabs, the Germans
who were settled here by Maria Theresa to colonise the lands
that had been neglected by the Turks. But we will not see
them if we go there by day, they will all be out at work in
Belgrade or in the fields. Is there anything specially interest-
ing there ? ’’ “ That is what I asked Constantine,” said my

husband, " but he only said, as one who is doing his best, that
the Schwab girls wore from ten to twenty petticoats.”

Next day we learned that the second part of our conversation
wtks explained by the first, as we crossed the Danube and found
our way to Zemun, which used to be the first town over the
Hungarian frontier, and is now remarkable only for its enormous
population of storks. Gerda wore an expression of sleepy satis-
f^action which increased as we drew nearer to Franzstal. Now,
as she sat at this table in the courtyard, eating her tepid sausages,
her face was soft with complete contentment. Constantine
watched her and broke into a tender laugh. “ Is it not extra-
ordinary, the patriotism of Germans ? ” he asked us. " My
wife is quite happy, because this little village is quite German
and she feels she is surrounded by what is German.” It was
difficult to make a helpful response. I am fond of England
myself, but 1 trust that if I lived in Rome I would not insist that
some French or German visitors who happened to be in my
power should cancel a trip to Tivoli or Frascati in order to spend
the day in an English tea-room. “ Would you believe it," con-
tinued Constantine fondly, ” she would not consent to be my
wife until I had admitted to her that Charlemagne was a
German. They are like rocks, these Germans.” A silence fell.
My husband and I were both reflecting that in the Nazis’
opinion Charlemagne was not a German but an oppressor of
Germans. Since we dared not make a frivolous comment and
could not make a serious one, our eyes grew vacant. Above
us the misused day was glorious. We heard doors banging in
the inn, somewhere a parrot began to scream. A girl in bunchy
skirts came into the courtyard, put down a ewer and pulled up
an iron plate in the paving and drew herself some water from

512 BLACK LAMB AND GREY FALCON

a well. “ Look,” said poor Constantine timidly, “ she is wearing
very many petticoats, it might be as many as ten or twenty."

Frushka Gora

We stood in the disordered rooms of some sort of society
called “ The Serbian Queen Bee ”, and I had difficulty in fixing
my attention on Constantine and the officials of the society as
they explained to us precisely what it was. We had started at
seven from Belgrade and had travelled for two hours to Novi
Sad, a journey which might have been pleasant, for the train
ran beside the hallucinatory landscape of the misted Danube
floods, but which was not, because it became apparent that
Gerda had decided to detest us. Every word and movement
of hers, and even in some mysterious way her complete inaction,
implied that she was noble, patient, industrious, modest and
self-effacing, whereas we were materialist, unstable, idle, ex-
travagant and aggressive. She was at that moment standing
in the corner of the room behind the men who were talking to
me, silently exuding this libellous charade.

The town, I understood they were telling me, had been
founded by the Patriarch Arsenius III at the end of the seven-
teenth century. When the Serbians revolted against the Turk
in 1689 and failed, the Emperor Leopold of Austria offered
them asylum on his territories, with full rights of religious
worship and a certain degree of self-government. There were
already a number of Serb settlers there who had been introduced
by the Turks when Hungary was theirs. The Patriarch accepted
the offer and led across the Danube thirty thousand Serbian
families, from all parts of the land, as far south as Macedonia
and Old Serbia. Some of them had settled here in Neuestadt,
as it had been called. A good many of them had fled back to
Turkish territory, for the Emperor broke his promises, and the
Austrians and Hungarians bled them white with financial and
military levies and forbade them the use of the Orthodox rite.
Only for a little time, under Maria Theresa’s Liberal son, the
Emperor Joseph, did the refugee Serbs enjoy honest treatment.
But they never forgot their language and their culture, and in
1823 they founded this literary society, “ The Serbian Queen
Bee ”. It was unfortunate that we had come to visit its head-

SERBIA

S13

quarters just when it had been handed over to the house painter,
they said anxiously.

We could get some idea of what the society had preserved,
we replied ; and pulled out some of the pictures that were
stacked against the wall. We came again and again on typical
portraits of the sort that pullulated on the whole of nineteenth-
century Europe except France, where there were too many
good eighteenth-century portrait-painters for artlessness to take
the country by storm. Men who were nothing but moustaches
and sloping shoulders, women who were nothing but smoothly
parted coiffures and stiffly caged bodices, had their Slav char-
acteristics contracted down to a liverish look. “ They did not
migrate here,” murmured my husband, “ until three hundred
years after the destruction of the Serbo- Byzantine civilisation.
I expect the continuity was quite thoroughly broken, and
that King Alexander was simply a doctrinaire acting on
nationalist ’’ His voice broke. “ Theory,” he added, un-

certainly. He had turned to the light a Byzantine Madonna,
vast-eyed, rigid in the climax of an exalted rhythm. The Serbs
had, indeed, not lost all their baggage on their way here.

” I will show you all,” said Constantine, ” all I will show
you. Therefore we must hurry, for I will show you the Patri-
archate at Karlovtsi, which has been the headquarters of the
Serbian Church since the great Migration of Arsenius, before
we go to the monasteries of the Frushka Gora.” So we soon
left this town, which was very agreeable and recalled my own
Edinburgh in its trim consciousness of its own distinction. Our
road took us into pretty country, green and rolling, at the
river’s edge. Once we paused at a church that had the remarried
look of a building that has changed its faith. It had been a
mosque during the hundred and fifty years the Turks held
Hungary ; it has since the early eighteenth century been a
Roman Catholic Church. The club-like atmosphere of a
mosque still hung round it, it had a wide terrace overlooking
the waters, where there should have been sitting impassive and
contented men in fezes, drawing on some immense secret fund
of leisure. We stood there for a moment, soothed by the miles
of water, pale as light itself, on which stranded willows im-
pressed dark emblems, garlands and true-lover’s knots and
cat’s-cradles. We went back to our contest with mud, with
the dark Central European ooze that is never completely

514 BLACK LAMB AND GREY FALCON

mastered save by a drought so extreme as to be a still greater
affliction, that rose now in thick waves before our wheels, that
kept the upper hand even in the main street of Karlovtsi, though
that was a handsome little town.

The Patriarchate was a nineteenth-century stone palace,
built in the Byzantine style with Austrian solidity, rich in arch
and balcony. We went up a flight of steps to the florid entrance
and rang the bell, and looked round us at the gardens, which
were very ornate in the formal style, with many flower-beds
laid out in intricate shapes and surrounded with low box hedges,
and numbers of lilac bushes bearing peculiarly heavy purple
flowers. The door did not open. We rang the bell again, we
knocked with our fists, we went back to the car and sounded
the hooter. Nothing happened, so we went into the gardens,
Constantine clapping his hands and crying " Holla I Holla 1 ”
to the unresponsive palace. The gardens were mystifying,
inside the beautifully tended box hedges the flower-beds were
choked with weeds, a single garden chair, made of white painted
wire in the Victorian fashion, was set quite alone on a wide
gravel space, with an air of deluded sociability, as if it had gone
mad and thought that there were about it many other garden
chairs. Children came in from the street and followed us about.
We could find no gardener, and the only door we could find
opened into a large room with stone shelves used for storing an
immense quantity of jam . We had given up all hope of entering,
and had paused to inhale the scent of the prodigious purple
lilacs, when an old man carrying an orange came out of a door
we had not seen and told us that the Patriarch was in Belgrade,
but there were some priests working at the printing-press near
by, and he would fetch us one of them.

There came to us a tall monk, nobly beautiful, wearing a
cloak of complicated design and majestic effect : all the garments
worn in the Eastern Church are inherited from Byzantium and
recall its glory. He had perfect manners, and was warm in his
greeting to Constantine and Gerda, but his eyes lay on us with
a certain coldness and reproach. I was surprised at this, for
I had always found Orthodox ecclesiastics disposed to treat
English people as if they were members of the same Church ;
but I supposed that here, at headquarters, they might be
stricter in their interpretation of schism and heresy. But he
W'as courteous, and told us that he would take us over the

Stj

Patriarchate, and would like also to show us the printing-press,
in which he took a special interest as he was head of Propaganda.

It lay behind the gardens, in a no-man ’s-land of alleys and
outhouses, countryish and cleali, with here and there more of
those prodigious lilacs, and little streams running down to the
Danube. From a courtyard filled with green light by a gnarled
old fruit tree we went into a dusty office, where an old priest
and a young one sat at rickety desks furnished with ink-wells
and pens and blotting-paper that all belonged to the very dawn
of stationery. Pamphlets of artless appearance, incompetently
tied up in bales, were lying about, not in disarray but in only
amateurish array. We went down a step or two to the composing-
room, where a man stood before the sloping trays and set up
print in the fantastic Old Slavonic type used in Orthodox
missals and in no secular writings whatsoever. We went up a
step or two into a room where young girls bound the pamphlets,
not very skilfully but most devoutly. Then in another room,
either two steps up or two steps down but certainly not on the
same level, we found a lovely twisted old man, deformed by
the upward spiral of his spirit, as El Greco loved to paint his
holy kind. He fed the printing machine with sheets as if he
had to school himself to remember that the poor mindless thing
could only do its sacred work at a certain pace. We might
have been visiting the office of some small, fantastic cult carried
on by a few pure and obstinate and unworldly people in some
English town. Indeed, I know a shop in a Sussex village, owned
by a sect which believes that the way to please God is by ritual
water-drinking, which was the precise analogue of this modest
and fanatic establishment. Yet this was the analogue of a
printing-press owned by the Church of England and housed by
the Archbishop of Canterbury in the grounds of Lambeth Palace.

We had still to wait for some minutes before the front door
of the Patriarchate, though the priest had gone through the
kitchen to send up a servant to open it. Then it slowly swung
open, and a withered little major-domo looked out at us. It
seemed to me that he pursed his lips when he saw my husband
and myself. " Good morning,” said Constantine, stepping
inside, " and how is life going with you ? ” “ Polako, polako,”
answered the little man, that is, “ Only so-so.” " Why, he
speaks like a Russian,” said Constantine, and talked to him
for a little. *' Yes,” he said, ” he was a Russian officer, and he

Si6 BLACK LAMB AND GREY FALCON

is very pious and he would like to be a monk, but he has a wife,
so they have made him major-domo here.” He was at least
somewhere which might have reminded him of his home. I
have never been to Russia, but I have visited states which formed
part of Tsarist Russia, Finland and Estonia and Latvia, and I
am familiar with villas that have belonged to rich Russians in
France and Italy and Germany, and I can recognise a certain
complex of decoration and architecture as Romanoff and nothing
else.

It has elements that can be matched in other countries.
Something like it can be seen in the older mansions built by
the nineteenth-century barons on Riverside Drive and in the
Middle West and the West ; there is the same profusion of busy
and perforate woodwork in the interior. There is a suggestion
also of the photogp-aph-frames and boxes made of shells which
are to be bought at English seaside towns ; and they recall
also the presents that people give each other in German pro-
vincial shops, such as umbrellas with pink marble tops cut into
stags' heads. There is a suggestion, in fact, of every kind of
bad taste known to Western civilisation down to the most naive
and the most plebeian ; and there is a curious absence of any
trace of the classical and moderating influence which France
has exercised on the rest of Europe, though it has suffered the
gilt infection spread by the Roi Solcil. Yet there is also from
time to time the revelation of a taste so superb that it puts the
West to shame. There is here a passion which is the root of our
love for beauty, and therefore of our effort for art ; the passion
for beautiful substances, for coloured gems, for shining stone,
for silver and gold and crystal. There is not only this basis for
art, there is art, there is a creative imagination that conceives
vast and simple visions, as a nomad would see them, who, lifting
his eyes from the plains, looks on the huge procession of the
clouds. There is also a feeling for craft ; this nomad was
accustomed to pick up soft metal and twist it into the semblance
of horses and wild beasts, shapes he could criticise, since he
rode the one and hunted the other, so much that he knew their
bodies as his own.

We are perhaps looking not at a manifestation of bad taste
at all, but at the bewilderment of a powerful person with perfect
taste who has been suddenly transported from a world in which
there are only a few materials and those in a pure state, to be

SERBIA

5*7

shaped by that taste or ignored, into another world, crammed
with small manufactured objects, the product of other people’s
tastes, which are so different from his that he cannot form any
just estimate of their value. The powerful Russian people were
kept from Western Art by the Tartar occupation. They have
never made full contact with it. This is no more than a giant’s
stupendous innocence ; yet it is also a giant's stupendous
vulgarity. He has resolved his doubts in too many cases by
consideration of the money value of objects, or of the standards
of people who may be of rank but who are historically ridiculous.
But he is a giant, and it is something to be above the dwarfish
ordinary stature.

There was, indeed, one room in the Patriarchate that was
magnificent, a conference chamber with a superb throne and
crimson curtains which might have been taken from one of the
finest Viennese palaces, but was derived from a larger and more
dramatic inspiration. The rest was faintly bizarre and some-
times that not faintly. We sat down in a small drawing-room,
while Constantine talked to the priest and the major-domo ;
and I remarked that the furniture was not what would have
been found in an English Archbishop’s palace. It was a suite
made from black wood, including chairs and tables and book-
cases, all decorated with gilt carvings, three or four inches long,
representing women nude to the waist, with their breasts
strongly defined. They were placed prominently on the pilasters
of the bookcases, on the central legs of the round tables, on the
arms of the chairs. They were a proof, of course, of the attitude
of the Orthodox Church regarding sexual matters, which it
takes without excitement, and I am sure nobody had ever cast
on them a pornographic eye. But for all that they were naively
chosen as ornaments for an ecclesiastical home.

“ But why," I said to Constantine, " are both the priest
and the major-domo looking at me and my husband as if they
hated us f ’’ " Oh, it is nothing personal," said Constantine,

’’ but they both hate the English.” " Ha, ha, ha ! " said Gerda,
laughing like somebody acting in an all-star revival of Sheridan,
“ that I suppose you find very odd, that anybody should hate
the English.” “ But what do they know about the English ? ’’
asked my husband. ‘‘ The old officer hates very much the
English,” explained Constantine, " because he says that it was
Sir George Buchanan who started the Russian Revolution."

5i8 black lamb AND GREY FALCON

We had to think for a minute before we remembered that Sir
George Buchanan had been our Ambassador at St. Petersburg
in 1917. “ But does he not think that perhaps Kerensky and
Lenin had a little to do with it t ” asked my husband. When it
was put to him the major-domo shook his head and emitted an
impatient flood of liquid consonants. " He says,” translated
Constantine, " that that is nonsense. How could unimportant
people like Kerensky and Lenin do anything like starting a
revolution ? It must have been someone of real influence like
Sir George Buchanan.”

" Now, ask the priest why he hates the English,” I said.
” It is because he believes that Lloyd George could have saved
the Romanoff dynasty," said Constantine, “ but I do not under-
stand what he means.” “ I know what he means,” I said ;
” he has heard the story that the Bolsheviks would have allowed
the Tsar and Tsarina and their family to come to England, and
Lloyd George would not let them. But you can tell him that
there was not a word of truth in that story, that Lloyd George’s
worst enemies have never been able to confirm it. The Bolsheviks
never offered to turn the poor souls over to us, and there is no
shred of evidence that they would ever have done so if they had
been asked.” But the priest only shook his head, his beautiful
brown eyes showing him as inaccessible to argument as if he
were a stag. “ It is no use talking to these good people,” said
Constantine, " for this house is all for White Russia. The
Patriarch is mad against the Bolsheviks, and he thinks that all
European problems would be solved and that we would enter a
Golden Age if only the Romanoffs were restored, and he cannot
see why England has not done it.” I thought apprehensively of
the stacks of pamphlets in the printing-press, with their rough
biscuit-coloured paper and their pale sticky type, and 1 wondered
what astonishing information they gave out when they were
designed, as they sometimes are, to instruct the Orthodox laity
in political matters.

Biit before we left for the Frushka Gora, the priest in the
grand cloak would have us see the Patriarchate church, which is
next door to the palace ; and once we were there all the in-
effectiveness and artlessness that we had seen, the clutching
at broken toys and the kindergarten assurance that life was
simple when it was in fact most complicated, fell into its place
and appeared legitimate In the white-and-gold theatre of a

SERBIA

519

baroque church the students of the theological seminary attached
to the Patriarchate were assisting at a Lenten mass. The
priests passed in and out of the royal door in the great icono-
stasis, which framed in gilt the richness of the holy pictures.
As they came and went there could be seen for an instant the
shining glory of the altar, so sacred that it must be hidden lest
the people look at it so long that they forget its nature, as those
who stare at the sun see in time not the source of light but a
black circle. The students’ voices affirmed the glory of the
hidden altar, and declared what it is that makes the adorable,
what loveliness is and harmony. The unfolding of the rite
brought us all down on our knees in true prostration, with the
forehead bent to the floor. “ It is only necessary to do this
during Holy Week," gasped Constantine apologetically in my
ear. “ I am so very sorry." He thought that English dignity
would be affronted by the necessity to adopt this attitude. But
there could have been nothing more agreeable than to be given
the opportunity to join in this ceremony, which, if nothing in the
Christian legend were true, would still be uplifting and fortify-
ing, since it proclaims that certain elements in experience are
supremely beautiful, and that we should grudge them nothing
of our love and service. It inoculated man against his constant
and disgusting madness, his preference for the disagreeable
over the agreeable. Here was the unique accomplishment of
the Eastern Church. It was the child of Byzantium, a civilisa-
tion which had preferred the visual arts to literature, and had
been divided from the intellectualised West by a widening gulf
for fifteen hundred years. It was therefore not tempted to use
the doctrines of the primitive Church as the foundation of a
philosophical and ethical system unbridled in its claim to
read the thoughts of God ; and it devoted all its forces to
the achievement of the mass, the communal form of art which
might enable man from time to time to apprehend why it is
believed that there may be a God. In view of the perfection of
this achievement, the ecclesiastics of the Eastern Church should
be forgiven if they show the incompetence in practical matters
and the lack of general information which we take for granted
in painters and musicians. They are keeping their own order,
we cannot blame them if they do not keep ours.

The Frushka Gora, that is to say the Frankish Hills, which
are called by that name for a historical reason incapable of

BLACK LAMB AND GREY FALCON

5*0

interesting anybody, lie to the south of the Danube ; and we
had to drive across the range to find the monasteries founded
by the seventeenth-century migrants, for they lie scattered on
the southern slopes, looking back towards Serbia. Once we
were over the crest we found ourselves in the most entrancing
rounded hills, clothed with woods now golden rather than green
with the springtime, which ran down to vast green and purple
plains, patterned with shadows shed by a tremendous cloud-
scape, slowly sailing now on its way to Asia. We stopped to
cat at a hotel high above a valley that fell in a golden spiral
to the plains ; and it should have been agreeable, for this is a
centre for walking-tours, and we had around us many young
people, probably teachers freed from their duty because it was
near Easter, and there is nothing so pretty as the enjoyment
people get out of simple outings in countries that have been
liberated by the Great War. It is so in all the Hapsburg
succession states, and it is so in the Baltic provinces that once
were Russia, Finland and Estonia and Latvia. But we did not
enjoy our outing so much as we might have, because Gerda
had been on the wrong side of the Peace Treaties.

Constantine was saying, “ And much, much did we Serbs
owe to those Serbs who were in Hungary, who were able to
bring here the bodies of their kings and their treasure and keep
alive their culture,” when Gerda crossly interrupted him. " But
why were the Serbs allowed to stay here ? ” "It is not a
question of being allowed to stay there,” said Constantine,
“ they were invited here by the Austrian Empire.” ■' Nonsense,"
said Gerda ; " one does not invite people to come and live in
one’s country." “ But sometimes one does," said Constantine ;
" the Austrian Emperor wanted the Serb soldiers to protect his
lands against the Turks, so in exchange he promised them
homes.” “ But if the Austrians gave the Serbs homes, then it
was most ungrateful for the Yugoslavs to turn the Hungarians
out of this part of the country,” said Gerda, " it should still be
a part of Hungary.” " But we owe nothing to Hungary, for
they broke all their promises to the Serbs,” said Constantine,
” and since the Austro-Hungarian Empire has ceased to exist
and we reconstituted it according to the principle of self-
determination and there were more Slavs here than any other
people, this certainly had to become Yugoslavia.”

To change the subject, Constantine went on, " But there

SERBIA

sat

are Slavs everywhere, God help the world. You have the
Wends in Germany, many of them, and some distinguished ones,
for the great Lessing was a Wend. They are Slavs.” " But
surely none of them remember that,” said my husband. ” Indeed
they do," said Constantine ; “ there was a Wendish separatist
movement before the war and for some time after the war,
with its headquarters in Saxony. 1 know that well, for in 1913
I went with a friend to stay in Dresden, and when we described
ourselves as Serbs the hotel porter would not have it at all. He
said, ‘ I know what you mean, and I have sympathy with all
who stand with their race, but you will get me into trouble
with the police if you say you are Serbs,’ and he would hardly
believe it when he looked at our passports and saw that there
was a country called Serbia.” “ But if all the Wends are Slavs,"
said Gerda, " why do we not send them out of Germany into
the Slav countries, and give the land that they are taking up to
true Germans ? ” “ Then the Slavs,” I said, “ might begin to
think about sending back into Germany all the German
colonists that live in places like Franzstal.” “ Why, so they
might,” said Gerda, looking miserable, since an obstacle had
arisen in the way of her ideal programme for making Europe
clean and pure and Germanic by coercion and expulsion. She
said in Serbian to her husband, " How this woman lacks tact.”
“ I know, my dear,” he answered gently, “ but do not mind it,
enjoy the scenery.”

She could not. Her eyes filled with angry tears, the lower
part of her face became podgy with sullenness. We none of us
knew what to say or do, but just at that moment someone turned
on the radio and the restaurant was flooded with a symphony
by Mozart, and we all forgot Gerda. Constantine began to
hum the theme, and his plump little hands followed the flight
of Mozart's spirit as at Yaitse they had followed the motion of
the bird at the waterfall. We all drew on the comfort which is
given out by the major works of Mozart, which is as real and
material as the warmth given by a glass of brandy, and I won-
dered, seeing its efficacy, what its nature might be. It is in
part, no doubt, the work of the technical trick by which Mozart
eliminates the idea of haste from life. His airs could not lag
as they make their journey through the listener’s attention;
they are not the right shape for loitering. But it is as true that
they never rush, they are never headlong or helter-skelter, they

53*

BLACK LAMB AND GREY FALCON

splash no mud, they raise no dust. It is, indeed, inadequate
to call the means of creating such an effect a mere technical
device. For it changes the content of the vrork in which it is
used, it presents a vision of a world where man is no longer the
harassed victim of time but accepts its discipline and establishes
a harmony with it. This is not a little thing, for our struggle
with time is one of the most distressing of our fundamental
conflicts, it holds us back from the achievement and compre-
hension that should be the justification of our life. How heavily
this struggle weighs on us may be judged from certain of our
preferences. Whatever our belief in the supernatural may be,
we all feel that Christ was something that St. Paul was not ; and
it is impossible to imagine Christ hurrying, while it is impossible
to imagine St. Paul doing anything else.

But that was not all there was in the music ; it was not
merely the indication of a heavenly mode. The movement
closed. It was manifest that an argument too subtle and pro-
found to be put into words — for music can deal with more than
literature — had been stated and had been resolved in some true
conclusion. If those of us who listened should encounter the
circumstances which provoke this argument we would know
the answer, wc would not have to agonise to find it for ourselves
if we had been sensitive enough to recognise it. But as the
ear-drums were taken over by the ordinary sounds of a restaurant,
by chatter and clatter, it became apparent how little as well as
how much the music had done for us. A particular problem had
been solved for us, but in a way that made it completely un-
serviceable to those millions of people who do not like music, and
that indeed was not as clear to all of us as it should have been
if we were to get on with the business of living. To comprehend
this solution we had all had to learn to listen to music for years,
and when we wanted to recall it in time of need we had to exer-
cise both our memories and our powers of interpretation. A
tool should not make such demands on those that handle it. And
of such solutions Mozart had found only a number, which was
large when one considered how great the genius required for
their finding, but small compared to the number of problems
that vex mankind ; and he was unique in his powers, none has
excelled him. Art covers not even a comer of life, only a knot
or two here and there, far apart and without relation to the
pattern. How could we hope that it would ever bring order

SERBIA

533

and beauty to the whole of that vast and intractable fabric, that
sail flapping in the contrary winds of the universe ? Yet the
music had promised us, as it welled forth from the magic box
in the wall over our heads, that all should yet be well with us,
that sometime our life should be as lovely as itself. But perhaps
no such promise had been given ; perhaps it was only true that
had a human voice spoken in such tones it would have been to
express tender and protective love. If the musician used them
in the course of his composition it might be only because he
found they fitted in some entertaining arrangement of the
scale.

At a point on the plains there was now heaped up a drift
of dark cloud ; and through this there ran a shaft of lightning.
A storm was on us, and it was in alternate blackness and greenish
crystal light that we began our journey to four of the monas-
teries of the Frushka Gora, a journey which was astonishing in
the directness of its contact with the past. It was as if one
should drive along the South Downs, turning off the main road
and following by-roads in to the downlands at Sullington and
Washington and Steyning, and should find buildings where
persons involved in the tragedy of Richard II had but newly
cast aside their garments in mourning, where the sound of their
weeping was hardly stilled. It made for a strangeness which
immediately caught the eye that all these monasteries so far from
Byzantium are built in the Byzantine fashion, with the quarters
for the monks or nuns and pilgrims built in a square round an
open space with the church in the middle. Though some have
been burned down and rebuilt in the style of the Austrian
baroque, they keep to the original ground plan, and cannot be
confused with anything of recent or Western inspiration.

The first monastery we visited had been rebuilt in Austrian
fashion. It raised above its quadrangle roofs a cupola as ornate
as a piece of white coral, dazzling now in the strange stormlight
against an inky sky ; and it lay among orchards, their tree-
trunks ghostly with spray. It might have been in the Helenen-
thal, an hour from Vienna. But within we found that the
Eastern idea was still in government, that a wall had been
built before the altar to dam the flow of light, to store up a
reservoir of darkness where mystery could engender its sacred
power. It possessed some relics of a saint, a Herzegovinian
soldier who had wandered hither and thither fighting against

BLACK LAMB AND GREY FALCON

S*4

the Turk, first under a Serbian despot and then under a Hun-
garian king. The legend ran that the Turks took the town
where he was buried and were terrified because rays of light pro-
ceeded from his grave ; and went to their emir, who was over-
come at finding who the dead man had been and gave his body
to the monks of this monastery. For this emir was a renegade
who had been taken prisoner by the Turks and had bought his
life by renouncing his faith ; and he was not only a Herze-
govinian, he was actually kin to the dead man. The news of
this wonder came to the Saint’s widow, who was a refugee in
Germany, and she sought out this monastery, in defiance of the
Turks, and became a hermit near by, till she died and was buried
here, near to her husband.

This might have happened yesterday, indeed it might have
happened to-day, for the monastery is in the care of White
Russian nuns, wearing a melancholy head-dress of a close black
cap fitting over a black veil that falls about the shoulders, and
still preoccupied by the distress of their exile. It was hard to
keep their misfortunes distinct in our minds from those of the
founders of the monastery, and indeed others had failed to do so.
Constantine halted by a grave in the quadrangle to tell me that
it housed an abbess who had been stricken down during the
seventeenth-century migration ; and two young novices who
were standing by, girls who had been born after their parents’
flight from their fatherland and had been drawn here by an
inborn Tsarist nostalgia, exclaimed in surprise. They had
thought her one of their own community who had died on her
way from Russia.

The black sky was pressing lower, the cloisters gleamed at
us through an untimely dusk. Constantine thought that if we
were to be storm-bound it had better be in a monastery where
there was more to see, and we hurried back to the car under the
first heavy pennies of rain. Thunder and lightning broke on us
as we ran into Krushedol, another monastery which has been
burned and given an Austrian exterior while keeping its ancient
core. But this was older than the others. When the leader of
the Slav forces at the battle of Kossovo, the Tsar Lazar, was
killed on the field, the rags of his power were inherited by his
kin, and there was one unhappy heir, named Stephen, whose
fate was lamentable even for that age. His father, forced to
seal a treaty by giving the Sultan Murad his daughter as a bride.

SERBIA

5*5

sent his son to bear her company ; but in time the Sultan fell
into war with his wife’s father and put out the young man’s
eyes lest he should take up arms in the fight. In his private
darkness he reeled across the Balkan Peninsula, sometimes a
captive dragged from prison to prison, then, released, back to
his father’s camp on the Danube, then away with his father
again to wander in exile. His father died, his two brothers, one
blinded like himself by the Sultan, engaged in fratricidal war ;
his mother also died, it is thought of poison, his blind brother
fled and became a monk on Mount Athos, his victorious brother
died. Though this dead usurper had named an heir, a party of
the nobles took Stephen, and, spinning him round as in the game
of blind-man’s-buff, made him declare himself Despot of Serbia.
The Serbians, seeing themselves threatened with civil war in the
face of their Hungarian and Turkish enemies, rushed on him
and sent him out of their land, bound and under guard. Again
he stumbled about the Balkan Peninsula, sometimes pushed
back into Serbia by his heartless supporters and beaten out
again by his reluctant subjects, always preserving his gentle,
patient fortitude. At one time he seemed to find a lasting
refuge in Albania, where the great hero Skanderbeg took a great
liking to him and gave him his own daughter, the Duchess
Angelina, for wife. But the Turks came to Albania also, and
the blind man was homeless again, and was in Italy when
death took him. Then his widow and his two sons, now penni-
less, started to wander afresh, and Hungarian charity maintained
them here. One of the sons became a priest, and he founded this
monastery, and in time all three of them were laid in the same
tomb before the altar. In the dark church, that blazed with
light because of the profligate but mellow gilding on the icono-
stasis, we were shown the Duchess Angelina’s narrow and elegant
hand, black and mummified, loaded with the inalienable rings
of her rank.

But there was other royalty here. Under a round red stone
on the floor was buried King Milan Obrenovitch, the king who
was so little of a success that he was forced to abdicate in 1889,
who wandered almost as much as Stephen, but on more com-
fortable routes, from Belgrade to Vienna and Paris, harried
not by the Turks without but by the Turk within. Nor was his
grave all we saw of him at Krushedol. There is a memorial
to him in the church wall, erected by the Emperor Franz Josef.

526 BLACK LAMB AND GREY FALCON

" Why not ? ” said Constantine. “ Milan was all for Austria,
he governed our country as an Austrian dependency." Later,
in the treasury, which was not in the church but in the monastery,
a flash of lightning dispersed the unnatural dusk and showed us
the contorted trees of the wind-flogged woods outside, and
inside a medley of Byzantine church vestments, medieval
chalices and crosses, ancient manuscripts, and the cups and
saucers, prettily painted with pale flowers in the Slav fashion,
the silver teapots and coffee-pots, the wine-glasses and decanters,
of King Milan's last establishment. These had been sent here
by the Emperor Franz Josef, to whom, by an act of testamentary
whimsy. King Milan had left the entire contents of his home.

It would be, quite simply, that he would hardly notice
to whom he left them, so long as it was not to his wife, Natalia,"
said Constantine. “ Is she buried here ? ” I asked. “ No, not
at all,” said Constantine. The negative he used sounded de-
lightful in this connection. " She is not dead, she is living in
Paris, very poor.* Only the other day the Government was
obliged to prevent a German company from making a film
about the Obrenovitches and she wrote a letter about it."
“ And she will never be buried here,” said the Abbot, a grave
person who had been a priest and had become a monk ten years
ago, after the death of his beloved wife. " That is, unless she
is granted the light before she dies, for she was converted to
Roman Catholicism about thirty years ago. It was a strange
thing to do, for our people had been kind to her, and had taken
her part when her husband dealt wickedly with her.”

In another room there was arranged all the furniture from
King Milan’s drawing-room ; a salon of the eighties sat there
in its stuffy and shiny richness, and from its walls there stared
the portraits of the doomed family — King Milan, with the
wide cat-grin of a tormented buffoon ; the excessively, grossly
beautiful Queen Natalia ; their fat son Alexander, who was like
his father in resembling a cat, though this time the cat had
been doctored, and Queen Draga, who was so prosaic that even
now, when we can recognise her expression as fear and know
what she feared, her face remains completely uninteresting.
The whole family has a dreadful look of frivolity turned as heavy
as lead, of romanticism prolonged to a long, uneasy, mono-
tonously fevered dream. There was also King Milan’s bedroom,
■ Queen Natalia died in a convent in Paris in May 1941.

SERBIA

5*7

furnished in rosewood, and more portraits of these unhappy
people, preserved in tragedy like flies in amber.

Before we went away I went into the treasury again to
take a last look at the embroideries, and caught sight of two
photographs which showed Serb peasants and soldiers and
priests walking through the snow, with expressions of extreme
anguish, bringing the body of King Milan to his grave. “ But
how could they feel so passionately about Milan Obrenovitch ? ”
I asked Constantine. " He had done ill by his country and ill
in his personal life. I noticed that even the Abbot spoke of him
as behaving wickedly.” ” It does not matter what Milan
Obrenovitch was in himself,” said Constantine. “ He was our
first-crowned king after the Turkish Conquest. When we were
free our power flamed like a torch in the hands of our Emperor
Stephen Dushan, but afterwards it grew dim, and in the poor
wretch who was the husband of the Duchess Angelina it guttered
and went out. The dead torch was lit again by Karageorge,
and it grew bright in the hand of his successor, Prince Michael
Obrenovitch ; and when Milan made himself king its light grew
steady though his was not the hand that was to bear it, and it
was the same torch that our ancient dynasty of the Nemaniyas
had carried. So why should we care what else he had done ?
It was not Milan but their king whom these Serbs were following
through the snow, it was the incarnation of Serbian power."

When the storm had lifted we drove out again on the plains,
now lying under a purged and crystal air, in which all things
were more than visible, in which each blade piercing the rich
spring earth could be seen for miles in its green sharpness, in
which the pools outside the villages carried not reflections but
solid paintings of the blue sky and silver clouds. Then we
turned back to the range of downs and entered it by a little
valley, which presently ran into a cache of apple orchards, a
lovely combe as sweet as anything Devonshire or Normandy
can show. Behind a white wall shielded by fruit trees and
Judas trees we found a monastery enclosing an astonishing
church that had been built after the emigration had done its
work on the migrated craftsmen’s imagination ; it was a fusion,
lovely but miscegenic, of the Byzantine and the baroque styles,
of fourteenth-century Eastern and seventeenth-century Western
styles. While we gaped there came up to us a Russian monk,
a young man who, like the nuns we had seen at the first

528 BLACK LAMB AND GREY FALCON

monastery, must have been bom after his parents had left
Russia. He was beautiful, with the eyes seen only in Russians
so far as 1 know, which look dangerous as naked lights carried on
the stage, by reason of their extraordinary lambency. He told
us with smiling remoteness that the Abbot was away ; and we
were disappointed, for the Abbot is a Pribitchevitch, one of a
family that has been dominant in this Serb colony ever since the
migration, and is the brother of a famous democratic politician
who died in exile during the dictatorship of King Alexander.
"That is a pity,” said Constantine; “however, we can still
show these English people what is interesting here.” “ But
there is nothing interesting here,” said the Russian monk, " we
have only the body of a Serbian emperor.” He spoke without
insolence, his remark proceeded from a complete failure to form
any sort of relationship with his surroundings, however hospit-
able they might have been, which is characteristic of a certain
kind of White Russian emigre.

We said that we found that interesting enough ; and he
went with us into the exquisite mongrel church, and we found it
glowing and beautiful within. There were two handsome girls
on step-ladders cleaning the windows, and they clattered down
and followed us, smiling in welcome and at the same time
murmuring in piety, as we went towards the sarcophagus of the
emperor. The Russian monk lifted its lid and showed us the
body under a square of tarnished cloth of silver, but would not
uncover it for us. He shrugged his shoulders and said that it
was only done on the emperor’s day ; he would have seemed on
a par with a girl in a milliner’s shop refusing to take a hat out
of the window, had it not been quite plain that, while he was
flagrantly frivolous, religious ecstasy was not only within the
range of his experience, it was never very far from him. But
the two girls behind us sighed deeply in their disappointment.

“ This is Urosh, the son of Stephen Dushan,” said Con-
stantine ; “ he was a poor weakling, and lost all his father’s
empire in a few years.” “ Yet he is venerated,” I said. " But
certainly,” said Constantine. " But do the people who venerate
him know what he did ? ” I asked. “ Do these girls, for
instance, know that he destroyed the Serbian Empire and paved
the way to Kossovo ? ” “ Well, I would not say they could

pass an examination in the facts," said Constantine, “ but
certainly they know that he was weak and he failed. That,

SERBIA

529

Rowever, is not of the smallest importance. He was of our
ancient dynasty, he was a Nemanya, and the Nemanyas were
sacred. Not only were they the instruments of our national
power, they have a religious significance to us. Some of them
are described on their graves as ' saintement ni ', bom in
sanctity : and this Urosh, though he was quite simply killed
by a usurper of his secular power, is called by our Church the
martyr. This is not mere nationalist piety. It is due to the
historical fact that the Nemanyas simultaneously enforced on
us Serbs Christianity and unity. We were Christians before, of
course, but we had not a living Church of our own. Then this
extraordinary family of little, little princelings from an obscure
village below Montenegro on the Adriatic came and did in a
few years as much as Rome has done for any state in centuries.
The first Nemanya to rule Serbia, Stephen Nemanya, became
a monk when he abdicated in favour of his son Stephen, and
is known as St. Simeon, and he is a true saint, the oil from his
grave at Studenitsa does many miracles ; and one of his sons
became our St. Sava and was a monk on Mount Athos, and left
his monastery when his brother’s throne seemed insecure and
organised Serbia into such a close-knit fabric of Church and
State that, though the heirs of the throne were incompetent for
sixty years afterwards, nothing could unravel it. But as well as
a statesman Sava was a saint, and was a pilgrim and visited the
monks of the Thebaid. And his brother, too. King Stephen the
Second, he also was a saint. When he lay dying he sent for
St. Sava to make him a monk, but St. Sava came too late ; but
God vouchsafed that he should be raised from the dead to take
his vows as a monk and so his corpse stood up and was con-
secrated. I tell you no people could be expected to forget the
identification between saint and king, between religion and
nationalism, which was made by our early history."

“ Good-bye,” said the Russian monk at the gateway, " the
Abbot will be sorry not to have seen you, particularly as you
are English. He has gone to the post-office now to complain
because some English books have not arrived ; I think they
were sent to him by something called the Left Book Club.”
We left the hills and went back into the plains, which were again
threatened by storm, and then returned to the hills by another
valley, which was astounding in its likeness to a corner in the
Wiltshire downs. Twisted thorn trees guard austere channels

530 BLACK LAMB AND GREY FALCON

of turf ; but the hillside that closed our road was broken by the
fine-drawn ironmongery of a pithead, and we came into a
mining village, as monotonous as such are in every country
and continent, but here radiant with whitewash. Among its
right angles we got lost, and stopped to ask our way to the
Vrdnik monastery from a group of boys. One of them got on
the footboards to guide us, and brought us down to a morass in
the middle of the village, which we had to skirt carefully, for
it was involved with a railway line. “ Look up, look up,” said
one of the boys, pointing up to the hillside before us, “ there
stands Vrdnik, see how great its walls are, see how rich it is,
with all its vineyards and orchards.” As we walked up a gold-
green avenue of poplars to the gateway he told us that he was
going to be a monk, and so were all the boys with whom he had
been walking when we found him. “ Why is that ? ” asked
Constantine. ” Did your mothers promise you to God when you
were bom ? " “ No, no,” he said. “ It is our own idea. We
love this monastery, we come to it whenever we can, and we
are always happy here, and we want to serve it all our lives."

Vrdnik is larger than the other monasteries, which is
natural, since its unique possessions attract many pilgrims ; and
because of the wealth drawn from these pilgrimages the large
two-storeyed quadrangle is in good repair, handsomely white-
washed, and laid out like a garden with plum trees and Japanese
quinces. The church is also different from the others. It seems
to reject the Byzantine prescription that magic must be made
in darkness. Direct light shines on the gilded iconostasis and
on the multicoloured thrones, and shines back amber from the
polished marble pavement. It can be so, for there is no need
to manufacture magic here. That already exists in the coffin
lying before the iconostasis, which contains the body of the Tsar
Lazar who fell at Kossovo.

He lies in a robe of faded red and gold brocade. A dark
cloth hides his head and the gap between it and his shoulders.
His mummified brown hands, nearly black, are crossed above
his loins, still wearing the bright rings of his rank. His dwindled
feet have been thrust into modern stockings, and over them have
been pulled soft medieval boots of blue silk interwoven with
a gold thread. He is shrunken beyond belief ; his hip-bones
and his shoulders raise the brocade in sharp points. He is
piteous as a knot of men standing at a street-corner in Jarrow

SERBIA

531

or a Welsh mining town. Like them he means failure, the
disappointment of hopes, the waste of powers. He means
death also, but that is not so important. Who would resent
death if it came when all hopes had been realised and all powers
turned to use ? There is an ideal point at which the fulfilment
of life must pass into the acceptance of death. But defeat is
defeat, and bitter ; not only for the sake of pride, but because
it blunts the sword of the will, which is the sole instrument
man has been given to protect himself from the hostile universe
and to impose on it his vision of redemption. When this man
met defeat it was not only he whose will was frustrated, it was
a whole people, a whole faith, a wide movement of the human
spirit. This is told by the splendid rings on the Tsar Lazar’s
black and leathery hands ; and the refinement of the pomp
which presents him in his death, the beauty and gravity of
the enfolding ritual, show the worth of what was destroyed
with him. I put out a finger and stroked those hard dry hands,
that had been nerveless for five hundred years. It is written
here that the lot of man is pitiful, since the odds are against
him, and he can command the success he deserves only if an
infinite number of circumstances work in his favour ; and exist-
ence shows no trace of such a bias.

In a dark and cramped treasury are some untidy ancient
manuscripts, on which a Tauchnitz edition of The Hound of
the Baskervilles has curiously intruded, and certain possessions
of the Tsar Lazar : the ikon on which he swore his nobles to
loyalty before the battle, the beaker from which he drank, the
model of one of his cities. There is no reason to doubt that any
of these are genuine. The Turks let Lazar’s widow take his
corpse and all his private treasures, and in the course of time
she placed them in the monastery of Ravanitsa, which he himself
had founded, in Serbia, far south of Belgrade on the way to
Nish. It was often attacked and damaged by the Turks, and
the migrants of 1683 took away its relics and built this new
monastery, which for this reason is often also called Ravanitsa,
to house them. I went down on my knees to peer at the precious
objects through the glass case of the cupboard. The ikon was
damaged but enormously beautiful ; in the background was a
soaring close-pressed assembly of saints, conceived by an
imagination disciplined and formalised by experience of cere-
monial. There was also a panel of velvet, once crimson, now

532 BLACK LAMB AND GREY FALCON

maroon, which was embroidered in silver-gilt thread with words,
many words, a prayer, a poem.

It was sewn by the Princess Euphemia, the widow of a
Serbian prince killed by the Turks, who had found refuge at
the court of the Tsar Lazar. After Lazar had fallen at Kossovo
she went with his widow Militza to the monastery of Lyubostinya,
where they both became nuns. She was an embroideress of
great genius. Two of the most famous pieces of early embroidery
in Europe are her work : the curtain for the sanctuary doors
in the church of Hilandar, the Serbian monastery on Mount
Athos, and a cloth for laying on the altar during Lent, now in
the monastery of Putna in Roumania. In the silence of the
monastery she worked a pall to cover the severed head of the
Tsar Lazar, and on it she wrote him a letter with her needle.

"You were brought up among all the good things of this
earth, O Prince Lazar, O new-made martyr," she begins.
“ The power of the Lord made you strong and famous among
all the kings of the world. You ruled over the land of your
fathers and in all right ways did you give happiness to the
Christian folk who were laid in your hands. In courage and
piety did you go out to do battle against the snake Murad, the
enemy of God's church, because your heart could not bear to
see the hosts of Ismail ruling in Christian lands. You were
determined that if you failed you would quit this crumbling
fortress of earthly power and, red in your own blood, be one
with the hosts of the Heavenly King.

" You had both your desires fulfilled. You slew the snake
and you won from God the martyr’s crown. So do not now
forget your beloved children, who are left desolate by your
death, while you are enjoying the everlasting delights of Heaven.
Many troubles and sufferings have fallen on your beloved
children, and their lives are passed in sorrow, for the sons of
Ismail rule over them, and we sorely need your help. There-
fore we beg you to pray the Ruler of Mankind for your beloved
children and all who serve them in love and faith. For your
children are girt about with many ills, and have forgotten, oh
martyr, your goodness to them. But though you have quitted
this life, you know the troubles and sufferings of your children,
and since you are a martyr, you can take certain freedoms with
the Lord.

“ So bow your knee before the Heavenly King who bestowed

SERBIA

533

on you the martyr’s crown ; beg Him that your beloved children
may live long and be happy and do His will ; beg Him that the
Orthodox Church may stand £rm in the land of our fathers ;
beg Him, Who is the Conqueror of All, that He gives your
beloved sons, Prince Stephen and Prince Vuk, the victory over
all their enemies, seen and unseen. If the Lord gives us His
help, we shall give you praise and thanks for it. Gather together
the company of your fellows, the Holy Martyrs, and with them
pray to the God that glorified you. Call Saint George, rouse
Saint Demetrius, persuade the saintly Theodores, take with you
Saint Mercurius and Saint Procopius ; forget not the forty
martyrs of Sebaste, in which town your beloved sons. Prince
Stephen and Prince Vuk are now vassals in the army of the
Sultan. Pray that they may be given help from God, come you
too to our aid, wherever you may be.

" Look on my humble offerings and magnify them with
your regard, for the praise I offer is not worthy of you, but is
only the little that I can do. But as you, my dear Ruler and
Holy Martyr, were ever generous of temporal and passing things,
how much more freely so will you give us of those great and
everlasting things which you have received from God. You
abundantly gave me what my body needed when I came to
you as a stranger in exile, and now 1 pray you both that you
will save me and that you will calm the wild storm in my soul
and in my body, Euphemia offers this from her heart, oh
blessed saint 1 "

Belgrade III

What has made modern Belgrade, though no one could
guess it by looking at the town, is a conscious attempt to restore
the glories of the medieval Serbian Empire. The nostalgic
frescoes of Oplenats truly reveal the dominating fantasy not
only of the Karageorgevitches but of the Serbian people. The
memory of the Nemanyas and their wealth and culture was
kept alive among the peasants, partly by the Orthodox Church,
which very properly never ceased to remind them that they had
once formed a free and Christian state, and also by the national
ballads. These poems are not quite so artless as they seem.
They were composed by the Serbs, more or less collectively,
quite a century after the battle of Kossovo, on the model of the

VOL. 1 2 M

534

BLACK LAMB AND GREY FALCON

chansons de geste, which reached the Balkan Peninsula through
Dalmatia at a very early date. Thereafter the full force of the
artistic genius of the nation, denied all other outlet, poured into
this medium ; and the late eighteenth century, which marked the
decline of folk-song in the West, here brought it new strength,
for the nationalist and liberal ideas popularised by the French
Revolution found their perfect expression ready-made in the
laments of this enslaved people. The Serbs who took part in
the First Rising against the Turks in 1804 were, therefore,
nothing like primitives who were simply revolting against an
immediate injustice. That revolt they were making ; but also
they were the heirs of a highly developed civilisation, which
they intended from the first to create anew.

It is possible that the monasteries of the Frushka Gora, the
blackened body of the Tsar Lazar, exerted a direct influence
on this Rising. Karageorge, after the flight from Serbia during
which he killed his stepfather, joined the Austrian Army ; and
though he deserted for a time and became a haiduk in the
mountains, because he believed that he was unfairly neglected
in a distribution of medals, he ultimately rejoined his regiment
and was accepted by his colonel, who was greatly impressed by
his personality, and got him employment after the end of the
Turco-Austrian war as a forest ranger in the Frushka Gora.
He was there for some years before the mildness of the new
Pasha of Belgrade, Hadji Mustapha, " the Mother of Serbia ",
tempted him to return to Serbia. He had therefore an ideo-
logical experience which is not conveyed in the usual description
of him as a swine-herd ; and indeed even his material circum-
stances are not what the term suggests. He was a dealer in
swine on such a large scale that his income was probably equi-
valent to about a thousand pounds a year at the time when
he was chosen as the Commandant of Serbia. Though the
common lot of the Christian inhabitants of the Ottoman pro-
vinces was poverty-stricken, a certain number of exceptions
enjoyed quite a handsome degree of prosperity ; and according
to the usual paradox of revolutions it was these exceptions and
not the oppressed multitude who revolted.

It is not clear why the Serbs chose Karageorge for this
office. He was over forty. Though he had served in the
Austrian Army he does not seem to have won any particular
distinction. He was of definitely unstable temperament ; he

SERBIA

535

was subject to fits of abstraction that lasted for days, and to
gusts of violence caused by flimsy suspicion. But he had a
superb physique. He was tall even for a race of tall men, with
burning eyes, wild coal-black hair, a face that was still hand-
some though deeply scarred, and a strange vibrant voice. He
was a bom warrior, and war was the breath of life in his nostrils.
More than all else he liked to take part in a cavalry charge,
spring from his horse at the climactic moment, and use his
rifle in close combat ; he shot with his left hand because his right
had been smashed to pieces in one of his early campaigns. He
had the prestige of high courage, and also that other strange,
almost mystical prestige which is accorded to a wealthy man
who renounces the more obvious enjoyments that his money
might buy. It was the habit of these prosperous Serb rebels
to practise a certain imitation of the Turkish pashas, to dress in
silks and use gold harness and chased arms, and keep a certain
degree of state in their homes. Karageorge dressed and lived
and worked with his hands like a peasant.

These were intimations of a certain distinction, but not of
the degree or kind which Karageorge afterwards manifested.
He showed himself for nine years as one of the most remarkable
men in European history. He was brilliant not only as a
fighting soldier but as a strategist ; his use of his forces to
harass an enemy that outnumbered . them sometimes by three
to one is among the most amazing triumphs of military genius,
and it is the more amazing since he had seen the inside of no
staff college. He was also a skilful diplomatist, both in dealing
with his own people, whom he had to educate in the primal idea
of unity, and in playing off Austria and Russia against Turkey
without compromising Serbian independence. In the task of
setting up some sort of governmental system to oust Turkish
maladministration he acted like a far-seeing statesman. There,
indeed, he showed the first and most unexpected qualities of
his genius.

It was evident that the strong individualities of the rebels
threatened the country with another form of the anarchy they
were seeking to correct. There was every possibility that it
might be split up under regional military chiefs, who would
wrangle among themselves and reduce the Balkan Christians
to the same state of disunity that had left them helpless before
the Turks four hundred years before. To control this situation

536 BLACK LAMB AND GREY FALCON

Karageorge founded a Skupshtina, or Parliament of Chiefs,
which met each New Year to settle all military matters, tactical,
strategic, political, financial and disciplinary. But this was
obviously not a complete government, and shortly after a visit
of certain Serbian chiefs to the Tsar led to the formation of
another body. In the course of their journey they went to
Kharkov, in Russia, and there they met a lawyer named
Filipovitch, who was a native of Novi Sad, a descendant of the
seventeenth-century Serb migrants. He suggested that he
should accompany them home and found a legislative and
judicial system in Serbia. They agreed, and took him back
with them to Karageorge, who, loyal to the influences of the
Frushka Gora, made him welcome and told him to get on with
the job.

Filipovitch then sat down and drafted a constitution for
the Serbian State. He invented a Soviet, or Council, of twelve
persons elected and paid by different districts to manage the
general affairs of the country. He inaugurated it, and be-
came its secretary. There is extant the correspondence in
which he made financial provision for the Army by selling the
houses and land owned by Turks in Serbian territory, fixed the
taxes, organised a system of magistrates, and instructed the
Soviet delegates in the exact nature of their rights, while warning
them against corruption. He also promulgated a legal code
based on the Code Napoleon. It is difficult to think of any man
in all history who undertook a more comprehensive labour
single-handed ; and it is interesting to find that Filipovitch was
never a vociferous patriot. He appears to have accepted the
post largely to escape the climate of Kharkov, which he found
extremely disagreeable. But he had a truly legalist mind, in
the highest sense, and he delighted in the task of imposing order
on a disorderly society for order’s sake ; and it is quite apparent
that that delight found a response in Karageorge’s very different
nature.

He supported Filipovitch enthusiastically in his educational
schemes, which were ambitious. Till that time the only schools
in Serbia were held in the monasteries, and attendance at them
involved great inconvenience, for the monks could not afford
to house pupils who did not help in the cultivation of their
lands, and a scanty education took several years. The Soviet
was instructed by Filipovitch to found an elementary school in

SERBIA

537

every big town, and a secondary school of ambitious curriculum
in Belgrade. This gi:eatly pleased Karageorge, for though he
himself could not read or write he was a great believer in
education, and he was always impressing on his followers, who
were for the most part as illiterate as himself, the advantages
of having all business recorded in writing.

Even after Filipovitch’s premature death Karageorge con-
tinued to work on his high plans. It became obvious as time
went on that the Senate did not counterbalance the Skupshtina
as had been hoped. The power of the rebel chiefs was, in fact,
the only real power in the land, and soon it controlled the
Soviet indirectly just as it directly controlled the Skupshtina.
They seemed likely not only to split up the country so that it
would be helpless before external aggression, but also to become
greedy and oppressive despots not to be distinguished from the
Turkish pashas. Karageorge met this threat by deposing two
of the most powerful chiefs, and by using his prestige as national
commandant to dominate the Soviet and force on it regard for
the interests of the whole people. He took this attitude partly,
no doubt, because the democratic tradition of the Slavs was
working in him, but chiefly because he knew as a soldier the
importance of national unity to a country perpetually threatened
by foreign dominance.

Karageorge kept at his task with unremitting grimness ;
and indeed he must have seemed a grim figure, for the essence
of his struggle was austerity. He was fighting against the Turks,
the practitioners of pagan luxury ; and in the first part of his
struggle he engaged those among the Turks who were the most
skilful in that practice, the rebellious Janissaries who had given
Sarajevo its intoxicating air of pleasure, and were rebelling
against the reformist Sultan Selim because he was endeavouring
to brace them to a new and Spartan dispensation. One of his
followers has left us an account of a night the Serbian Army
spent during the campaign of 1805 on the heights above the
town of Parachin, which was occupied by the Turks. When the
trenches had been dug and Karageorge had inspected them and
seen that all was prepared for the morrow’s battle, he sat down
on a cannon and asked his officers if there was any plum brandy
about. They fetched him a flask of plum brandy and some
com-pone, and he drank and passed the flask to them, and
shared the corn-pone out. They looked down on Parachin,

538 BLACK LAMB AND GREY FALCON

which was blazing with light in the darkness below. It seemed
almost to be in flames, such was the brightness. Light was
streaming out from the Pasha’s palace, and they could hear the
sound of pipes and flutes and drums. One of Karageorge’s
suite, a man who was called Stephen the Scribe and was
kept simply as a secretary, being notoriously no good as a
soldier, looked down on the town and said, “ Do let me fire off
this gun at the Turks I ” Karageorge laughed at him, but he
went on begging. “ Do let me take one shot — just one — at
the palace I " Karageorge jeered, “ But you might kill the
Pasha 1 ” " Well, why not ? " asked Stephen the Scribe.

“ Well," said Karageorge, " you mustn’t do that. You might
make his children orphans, and they'd have nobody to buy them
shoes, and then they might catch cold running round barefoot
and die of fever.’’ But Stephen the Scribe teased him till he
got his way, and very unskilfully pointed the gun and fired it.
The ball cut through the air like lightning, and went straight
for the Pasha’s palace. In one instant the flutes and pipes and
drums came to a stop, the lights went out, and there was dark-
ness and silence. Very often Karageorge’s rebellion must have
seemed just such a murderous cannon-ball, that put an end to
brightness and music, and established the night.

His end was not to be deduced from his beginning. After
a time the war he had to conduct changed its form. The Serbs
had begun their insurrection to rid themselves of the Dahis, the
rebel Janissaries who had set themselves up as independent
despots in defiance of the Sultan ; but when they had beheaded
the four chiefs they began to dream of freeing themselves from
Turkey. Indeed, the treachery with which the Sultans treated
them in spite of their services made them realise this as a
necessity. This raised a problem which differed from year to
year according to the situation of Europe. When Napoleon
defeated Austria and the Turks were harried by Britain and
Russia, then Serbia had reason for hope. But Napoleon's star
waned, Russia was a preoccupied and often disloyal ally, and
Turkey was reorganised by the great Sultan Mahmoud II.
Finally in 1813 a Serbian army of fifty thousand faced an army
of treble that number. Defeat was certain, but the Serbians
knew w’hat it was to be outnumbered and could quite well have
put up enough resistance to gain them a negotiated peace, had
not Karageorge, quite simply and shamefully, run away. He

SERBIA

539

fell back, when he should have been bringing up reinforcements
to support a harassed body of troops who were making a
magnificent stand before the main Turkish army. His officers
suddenly found he had deserted them without a word of
explanation. For a time he wandered about the country, and
then fled over the Danube, back to Novi Sad and the Frushka
Gora.

Nobody knows the reason for Karageorge's conduct. He
never published any justification of it. Till then his worst
enemies had never charged him with cowardice or lack of care
for his country. It is possible that fatigue had released that
unstable element which had caused his early fits of melancholy
and abstraction. His family life had been tragic. The murder
of his stepfather had not been the only act of violence
which he had been obliged to commit against his family. He
had a ne’er-do-well brother who had crowned his career by
committing rape. This was an offence which was regarded as
being at least as serious as murder ; it was so often committed
by Moslems on Christians that for a Christian to rape a Chris-
tian was not only a sexual crime, it had a renegade flavour. So
Karageorge ordered his brother to be hanged at the door of his
house, and forbade his mother to mourn her son. This was the
appointed procedure, and there was nothing remarkable about
it, but the relationship of brother and brother among Slavs
is peculiarly close, and even if his individual sensibility was
calloused, his racial self must have been appalled.

He had also led as extravagantly busy a life as, say, N apoleon,
if one takes his illiteracy into account and considers what it
would mean to be Commander-in-chief and Prime Minister
under that handicap ; and he was now fifty-one. He had
added to his routine considerable demands on his detective
capacities and a perpetual burden of apprehension. He had
all the time to scan the rebel chiefs who were the medium
through which he had to work, and judge whether they were
loyal or disloyal, and if the latter, decide when he had best
strike against them. Again and again he had to smother
conspiracies, not only to save himself, but to protect the .State.
It would be no wonder if after nine years of this hag-ridden life
he should forget his nature and sink into apathy. But it is
perhaps also relevant that the dominant figure of the Kossovo
legend which shaped him as ail other Serbians was the Tsar

540 BLACK LAMB AND GREY FALCON

Lazar, who was not victorious, who did not preserve his people,
who lay a blackened and much-travelled mummy in the exile
of the Frushka Gora. That dominance perhaps explains why
the Serbs always respect Karageorge as the founder of their
liberty, withdrawing no part of their homage because of his
failure.

There is yet a pendant to this mysterious eclipse of a great
man. Four years later Karageorge returned to Serbia. Since
the country was then ruled by Milosh Obrenovitch, his deadly
enemy, who hated him because he suspected him of the murder
of his half-brother, he cannot but have anticipated that he would
meet his death. And the trip proves to be even more suicidal
than it appears at first sight if his ostensible reason for returning
is examined. Though the Greeks were like the Serbs, in revolt
against the Turks, the Serbs had never trusted them. Since
the Turks had abolished the Serbian Patriarchate and put the
Serbs under Greek priests there were too many old scores about
to make for a successful alliance. Karageorge knew this and
during his domination of Serbia he had for this reason held
his country free of all entanglements with the Greek rebels. But
in 1817, at a time when Milosh Obrenovitch was engaged in the
most delicate negotiations with the Sultan, Karageorge came
back to Serbia as an agent of the Greek revolutionary society,
the Ethnike Hetaira, to induce the Serbians to stage a rising at
the same time as a Greek revolt. He must have known that
Milosh Obrenovitch would have to silence him, not for his own
interest but for the sake of the country. He must have known
how Milosh Obrenovitch was likely to silence him. He was
killed by an unknown assassin while he lay asleep in a cave.

But that suicidal streak was not peculiar to him. It showed,
against all expectation, in Milosh Obrenovitch also, though the
two men were utterly different in character. His palace still
stands in Belgrade ; it is a Turkish house, with a projecting
upper storey, full of air and light, with many water conduits. In
Belgrade there may be seen, on the first floor of the Museum of
Prince Paul, the robes worn by him and his wife. Richer far
than the gear of the Karageorges, which is shown alongside,
they might have been worn by a Turkish pasha and the flower
of his harem. And indeed he gave his audiences like a pasha,
seated cross-legged on silk cushions, wearing the turban.
Milosh had his eye set on the quality that Karageorge had

SERBIA

541

seemed likely to drive out of Serbia, the luxury and pleasure
which had made Sarajevo, which had lit the lights at Parachin.
He meant not to expel it but to transfer it from the possession
of the Moslems to the Christians.

He was capable of arranging the transference. He had only
to follow where Karageorge led, but he brought genius to his
following. When Karageorge iied across the Danube in 1813,
and most of the chiefs who had owned him as leader fled into
exile like lost sheep, Milosh stood his ground and calmly awaited
the horror which he knew would burst on the country once the
Turks returned. There was a preliminary massacre, with im-
palements and mutilations and roastings on spits ; then there
was systematic banditry, the worst of it under a legalistic guise.
All sorts of Turks appeared, passing themselves off as land-
owners and merchants driven out by the rebel Serbs, who
claimed land and wealth which had certainly never been theirs ;
and all those claims were allowed. The Serb population was
beggared.

Milosh waited by, smiling and bland. He ingratiated him-
self with Suleiman, the new Pasha of Belgrade, who had been
wounded by him on the battlefield and therefore respected him,
and who trusted him because of his known enmity to Kara-
george. Suleiman made him governor of three large districts,
and he repaid this honour by apparent subjection of the most
absolute kind. He constantly exhorted the Serbians to lay down
their arms and think no more of resistance to the Turks. When
some rebels collected in one of his own districts, he went at once
and persuaded them to surrender on a promise from Suleiman
that they should be pardoned. That promise was broken. One
hundred and fifty of them were beheaded, and nearly forty im-
paled ; and Milosh himself was sent to Belgrade and kept in
captivity. He bribed his way out. The resources on which
all these rebels could draw were far larger than the modern
reader would imagine. He returned to his home and found the
people frantic with rage and terror, persuaded that there was
again about to be a general massacre. Then he judged it well
to act, and he put himself at their head. In six months he
had driven out the Turks.

It must be owned that Milosh never faced such huge odds
as Karageorge, and that he gained one of his most inexplicable
victories because the Turkish commander made a sudden flight.

54a BLACK LAMB AND GREY FALCON

just as inexplicable as Karageorge’s great defection. But
Milosh showed military genius of the same impressive order
as his rival, and later he showed himself a far greater diplomat
and, by one supremely important act, at least as great a states-
man. After his victory he made a technical avowal of subjection
to the Sultan and then sat down to negotiate the independence
of his country, with infinite guile and patience. He knew just
how to play on Turkey’s fear of Russia ; and he never let him-
self forget that, in actual fact, it would not be easy for the
Russian Army to come to Serbia’s aid. He threatened to adhere
to one or other of the great powers when Turkey was at ease
in her foreign relations, but when she was perturbed he proffered
the most soothing assurances of neutrality. He had an in-
fallible nose for the right moment to bribe a pasha or roll a
threatening eye on a vizier. It took him eighteen years to
wring Serbian independence from the Porte, when not a soul
in Europe had thought the Porte would give way to him till
the Turkish Empire had dissolved. True, it was not complete
independence that he gained. Turkey insisted on her right to
garrison certain towns, notably Belgrade, and refused to
promise not to poke her nose into Serbian affairs. But it
was practical independence. Turkish oilicials and regular and
irregular troops no longer roamed at large in the land.

Milosh’s supreme act of statesmanship followed that victory.
The Treaty of Adrianople which gave Serbia its effective
freedom, burdened only by a few irksome but not serious
restrictions, also handed over to Milosh extensive crown lands.
He might have distributed them as backsheesh to his followers
and founded a large class of landowners on whose power he
could have relied. Instead he gave the lands to the people as
small-holdings, and guaranteed Serbia as a peasant state, there-
by giving her her happiness and her distinctive genius. This
great service, as the culmination of a career so full of military
and diplomatic gifts to his country, might have made him the
most beloved ruler in Europe, had he not seen to it that his
fame was far otherwise. He had for years been practising a
highly offensive and unnecessary despotism. He was certainly
responsible for the death of two of his political opponents ; and
even if a light hand with murder was not to be harshly judged
on territory demoralised by Turkish occupation, there was no
excuse for seizing a fellow-Serb’s house and fields without a

SERBIA

543

shado'w of justification, or forcing peasants to labour for him
at his wiir, or enclosing connmon forest-land as pasture for his
own swine.

As he became more and more powerful, he behaved with
more and more fantastic improbity. It might have sobered
him that the Sultan had appointed him first Prince of Serbia ;
but it only seemed to intoxicate him. He made his subjects
pay their Turkish tribute in Austrian currency, but forwarded
it in Turkish currency and pocketed the difference. He in-
sisted on his right to punish his officers by beating. He enraged
his subjects by establishing a monopoly on salt, a commodity
which was scarce in Serbia and had to be imported from Wal-
lachia, and by investing his ill-gotten profits in a Wallachian
estate, to which he proposed to retire if he was deposed. This,
surely, was putting the words into the people’s mouth. He had
a remarkable wife. Princess L)rubitsa, who had in her youth
stood beside many a battlefield and urged on the warriors with
heroic invective, who cooked her husband’s meals and waited
on him at table all her days, who was reputed to chastise any
lady who caught her husband’s eye, with such terrible effect
that some had been known to die. It is fairly plain that his
absolutism made her think he had gone mad, and that she
begged his friends to warn him that he was running his head
into a noose.

But the noose was where he wanted his head to be. In
1838 a constitution was thrust upon him, in the course of a
farce played out by the great powers. Russia and Turkey
believed that if Serbia had a constitution they could in practice
guarantee and interpret it ; so the Tsar Nicholas and the Sultan
Mohammed, the two great despots of Europe, forced constitu-
tionalism on Serbia. Hence Palmerston and Louis-Philippe,
the two apostles of Liberalism and Parliamentary control, found
themselves forced to urge Milosh to become an absolute
monarch. The fuss seems quite nonsensical ; why it should be
easier for an external power to influence a constitutional monarch
than an absolute one is not clear, and the whole dispute was
probably conjured up by some silly young man in one of the
Foreign Offices. But Russia and Turkey won, and a constitu-
tion was presented to the delighted Serbian people.

Milosh refused to execute it. He tried, indeed, to suppress
it altogether, but the Opposition knew of it. A group of deter-

BLACK LAMB AND GRBY FALCON

544

mined men gathered under a chief called Vutchitch, who had
been one of Milosh’s bravest and most devoted aides till his
loyalty had been broken by the cruel and imbecile caprices
of his master. One day they surrounded Milosh’s house and
sent away his guards of honour, and also those who were de-
tailed to wait on the Princess Lyubitsa. She went to her husband
to be by his side, and when he saw her he said, " Well, you see
it was no use your siding with my enemies. They have taken
away your guard of honour too." She burst into tears.

There was a long discussion concerning Milosh’s fate.
Some of the chiefs maintained that he should be put to death
for the sake of national peace and unity. But he was the first
prince Serbia had had since Kossovo, and the profound, even
superstitious sense of dynasty which had been inherited by these
Serbians made them regard him as by that token sacred. They
decided he must abdicate in favour of his eldest son Milan, and
go into exile. When they told Milosh he said, " If they no
longer desire to have me, it is well, I will not intrude on them,”
and he signed the deed of abdication. Two days after he crossed
the Sava to Austrian territory. Many people, even Vutchitch,
wept to see him. Nevertheless Vutchitch flung a stone into the
river and cried out to Milosh. “ When this stone floats you will
come back to Serbia." " 1 shall die as Serbia’s ruler,” answered
Milosh, and the boatmen rowed on, bearing him to his strange,
imbecile, unsanctihed renunciation.

Belgrade IV

The action of Vutchitch and his followers in accepting
Milosh’s princedom as hereditary was more bizarre, more a
matter of totem and taboo, than appears. For his heir was
totally unsuited to be a ruler, at least at that moment. Always
delicate, he was now so ill that he could not be told of his
father’s fall, and he died after some weeks without ever having
learned that he was Prince of Serbia. His younger brother,
Michael, was still a boy, and his accession involved the incon-
veniences bound to arise out of the appointment of counsellors
who were practically regents. Quite suddenly Turkey insisted
on appointing these counsellors, and named Vutchitch and a
chief called Petronievitch, who was on good terms with the Turk

SERBIA

545

and was strongly anti-Milosh. The Serbians disliked these
counsellors because they were named by Turkey and held
Turkish sympathies ; Michael resented their existence because
he wished to govern by himself, and had a personal grudge
against them for their hostility to his father. A further com-
plication existed because a conspiracy to remove Michael from
the throne was being organised in an unexpected quarter. The
other members of the Obrenovitch family marshalled them-
selves against him with a unity that sprang from an unusual
and fascinating diversity of opinion. Two of Milosh’s brothers
had remained in Serbia ; one of these was all in favour of
deposing Michael because he himself had not been made a
cabinet minister, another wanted to expel his nephew because
he thought the boy would make a mess of it and one fine day
all Obrenovitches would be massacred. And abroad the Prin-
cess Lyubitsa was deeply involved in the conspiracy, for the
reason that, if there had to be shooting, she preferred her
husband rather than her son to be the target.

The boy met this complicated situation with spirit. Actually
he had inherited all his father’s genius and brought a much
better character to the using of it. He faced the pestilential
Vutchitch, who had rebelled against Milosh with courage and
patriotic passion, but now discounted that achievement by show-
ing that rebellion was his only reaction to every circumstance ;
and he drove him into exile. But this very spirit raised the
suspicions of the peasants, particularly as about that time it
became necessary to depreciate Serbian currency and to raise
the taxes, which Vutchitch had disingenuously lowered when
he drove out Milosh in order to make the step popular. They
feared that he was going to rob them of their money and their
rights as impudently as his father, and when Vutchitch returned
to Serbia in the guise of a defender of the constitution they took
up arms and followed him. Michael knew Vutchitch was
inspired by the Sultan and went out to fight him, confident that
he would free his country from the last traces of Turkish
suzerainty, and that his people must applaud him for it. He
was amazed when the deluded peasants followed Vutchitch,
and his own army, itself disaffected, ran away. With a certain
significant dignity, he disbanded such of his troops as remained
loyal and sent home all peasants who had come from the
provinces to support him, and passed over to Austrian territory.

546 BLACK LAMB AND GREY FALCON

It is one of the paradoxes of Balkan history that though the
Serbians who rejected Michael were moved by ignorance and
stupidity and negativism, later events proved they were per-
forming an enormous service to their country.

Vutchitch then entered Belgrade in triumph and was ac-
claimed as " Leader of the Nation ”, but his profound instinct
against simplicity prevented him from putting himself forward
as Prince. It seemed good to him, for what reason it cannot
be imagined, to force on the Skupshtina Alexander Karageorge-
vitch, the son of Karageorge, a man of thirty-six, upright and
sensible and not contentious, but not impressive in personality.
This set in motion the strange oscillation of Serbian sovereignty
between the Obrenovitches and the Karageorgevitches which
has been so misconceived in the West. It has been thought of
as a sanguinary conflict between the two families. Even H. W.
Temperley writes in his History of Serbia, " For a century the
ghastly struggle was continued by the partisans of both houses,
until the last living Obrenovitch was assassinated in our own
day " : and elsewhere he deplores " this terrible blood feud ".
But in actual fact when Milosh Obrenovitch murdered Kara-
george he committed the last crime that either family was to
inflict on the other. Only one Karageorgevitch was ever to die
by violence, and that was King Alexander of Yugoslavia ; and
he can hardly have been killed at Marseilles by an Obrenovitch,
for by then the breed was extinct. Two Obrenovitches died by
violence, but there is no evidence that any Karageorgevitch
was responsible. One Karageorgevitch was deposed and one
Obrenovitch was forced to abdicate, but in neither case could the
other family be blamed. Indeed the abdicating Obrenovitch
handed over his throne to his son.

It may be doubted whether there was any effective enmity
between the families till late in the second half of the nineteenth
century. Certainly there was little at this time. Milosh Obreno-
vitch had persuaded Karageorge’s widow that he was guiltless
of her husband’s death ; and at his invitation she had brought
her children back from Hungary to Serbia, and had accepted a
pension to keep them. During the reign of young Prince
Michael, Alexander Karageorgevitch had cheerfully and loyally
acted as the boy's adjutant. He certainly did not rise to prince-
dom by any attacks he had made on the Obrenovitches, and it
needed no effort on their part to account for his expulsion

SERBIA

547

seventeen years later in 1859. His reign began tediously with
a great deal of hubbub caused by Russia and Turkey. Dynastic
Russia was shocked because So'bia had cast aside a hereditary
prince and thought that she ought to have been consulted.
Turkey had already recognised Alexander and told Russia so.
In the end Russia grumpily consented to recognise Alexander,
though only after he had been chosen by a free election, on
condition that the abominable Vutchitch and his colleague
Petronievitch, both pro-Turks, were sent into exile. Vutchitch
had therefore gained nothing by his continual intrigues and
mischief-making. But when these excitements settled down
it was only to disclose a situation in which Alexander’s failure
was inevitable.

The historians call him weak. It would be far more true
to say that in his reign Serbia discovered its weakness. It
had come to life again not as a great empire, but as a small
nation ; and it was to learn, what was to become tragically
clear in the twentieth century, that modern conditions make the
independence of a small nation a bad joke. In 1848 Alexander
and Serbia suffered a deep and inevitable humiliation. The
Magyars of Hungary rose against the Austrian Government ;
and as their nationalist movement, under the leadership of the
renegade Slav Kossuth, showed the most bitter hostility to all
Slavs, the Serbs of Novi Sad and the Frushka Gora made
haste to revolt against Hungary. It was then that the Croats
took the same resolve and marched into Hungary under
Yellatchitch. It was a shame and an agony to the Serbians that
their brothers, the descendants of the seventeenth-century
migrants, the guardians of the blackened body of the Tsar
Lazar, should be in danger, and that they should not go to
help them. But Russia would not have it so, lest Austria should
defeat the Slavs and draw a conquered Serbia into her orbit.
So Alexander Karageorgevitch had to sit with folded hands
while the Danubian Serbs fought for life and lost. Twelve
thousand Serbian volunteers went to their aid, but Serbia as a
state had to behave like a coward.

Six years later it again seemed to his people that he had
humiliated them. The Crimean War broke out and Serbia
longed to take sides with Russia against Turkey. Serbia’s
incubus, Vutchitch, who had been exiled as pro-Turk and anti-
Russian, had now got back to the country as anti-Turk and

548 BLACK LAMB AND GREY FALCON

pro-Russian, and he persuaded the country to elect him as Prime
Minister. Needless to say, he did nothing whatsoever to
further its cause. He was a pure negativist. A Turkish army
advanced towards Serbia on the south and an Austrian army
confronted her across the river at Belgrade. Again Alexander
had to remain inactive and frustrate national feeling.

The peasants could not understand that he was bowing to
the inevitable. They only saw that he did not resist their
ancient enemy, Turkey, and that he had shown complete sub-
servience to Austria, whom they now feared almost as much as
Turkey, and quite rightly. For though the Serbs of Novi Sad
had helped Austria to defeat the Magyar revolt, Franz Josef
was to betray them as he was to betray the Croats who had
shown him a like loyalty. He would after a few years hand them
back to the Hungarians, who would take their revenge by a
merciless process of Magyarisation, which would deny the Serbs
their language, their religion and their culture. The sound
political sense of the Serbians alarmed them. Needless to say,
Vutchitch skipped forward to organise their discontent, and
there was a conspiracy of senators to murder Alexander. It
failed, but it was made unnecessary by a meeting of the
Skupshtina, which without a dissentient called on him to resign
and demanded the recall of Milosh Obrenovitch.

Alexander Karageorgevitch obeyed without a shadow of
resistance, and Milosh returned with his son Michael. The old
man was now seventy-eight years of age, and the records show
that he thoroughly enjoyed the day of his return. The Austrians
refused to let him cross the river in their steamers, so he came
over in a rowing-boat, just as on that day when he told Vutchitch
that he would die the ruler of Serbia. On landing he made a
deft speech which made it quite clear that he intended to dis-
regard the Turkish pretension that the princedom of Serbia
was not to be hereditary. " My only care,” he said to the
cheering crowds, " will be to make you happy, you and your
children, whom I love as well as my only son, the heir to your
throne. Prince Michael.” That established the issue so firmly
that the Turks could hardly care to dispute it. The old man then
took up the routine where he had laid it down twenty years be-
fore, with all his characteristic zest. It is impossible not to feel
pleasure in recording that one of his first actions was to throw
Vutchitch into prison. There, very shortly, he died. The

SERBIA

549

Turks wished to examine his body, but Milosh explained that
it was better that they should not

His reign lasted only twenty months, during which he gave
himself great amusement and pleased his people by using his
old insolent skill in diplomacy to inflict some important defeats
on the Turks. It is as well that he ruled so short a time, for he
had nothing to offer but that skill. If he had lived longer he
must have been faced by that hard fact, the helplessness of the
small nation, which had vanquished Alexander Karageorge-
vitch, and he must have been vanquished too, for he had no
resources to meet it. But it was very different with his son
Michael, who on his accession to the throne showed how well
the tricksters and simpletons responsible for his exile in 1842
had worked for their country. For he had spent the intervening
years in improving his education and visiting the Western
capitals of Europe, in pursuit of the definite end of fitting him*
self for monarchy. The specific problem before him was the
transformation of a medieval state into a state which would be
modern enough to defend itself against modern empires. He
attacked it with a genius that never failed until his death.

First, Michael gave Serbia internal order. He impressed on
it the conception of law as a code planned to respect the
rights of all which must be obeyed by all. No longer was the
ruler to bring his enemies before judges who touched their hats
and gave the desired sentence. He and all his subjects had to
face a blindfold justice. He reorganised the political constitu-
tion, laying it down that the members of the Soviet were no
longer to be resp>onsible to the Sultan but to their own national
authority, and that the Soviet was to be subordinate to the
democratic Skupshtina. He also took a powerful step towards
the establishment of order by setting up a regular army under
French instructors. Till then the Serbian military forces had
been a synthesis of private armies led by chiefs who submitted
only fitfully to the discipline of a central command, and were
always favourable material for a meddler like Vutchitch. This
Michael did against the violent opposition of Austria, who wanted
to annex Serbia, Turkey, who wanted to recover her, and Great
Britain, who was Turcophile. Only Russia and France be-
friended her.

Secondly, he drove the Turks out of Serbia. For they were
still in the fortresses of the principal towns. Two years after

VOL. 1 2 N

S50 BLACK LAMB AND GREY FALCON

his accession there occurred the famous incident when the
population of Belgrade were not unnaturally moved to demon-
strations at the murder of two Serbians by two Turks, and the
pasha in command of Kalemegdan fortress thought fit to bombard
the open town for five hours, until he was forcibly restrained by
the foreign consuls. Michael was able to use this to prove just
how intolerable it was for a vigorous and developing country to
have to submit to these fantastical vestiges of an ill-regulated
authority, and to represent the outrage in terms comprehensible
to the Western powers. He followed this up by sending his
beautiful and able wife, Julia Hunyadi, to London to influence
British public opinion, which she was able to do through
Cobden and Palmerston. Soon he had Great Britain, France,
Russia and even Austria lined up behind him in his demand
that the Turks should withdraw their garrison ; and he showed
his father's diplomatic skill by making the demand in terms that
enabled Turkey to grant it without lack of dignity.

Thirdly, he found a new foreign policy. He knew he was
his father’s son and better, and that he could get everything he
wanted from the great powers by wheedling and threatening.
But that was not enough, for he knew it would hold good only
so long as the empires were in a state of quiescence. When they
should be moved by a real need for expansion his guile would be
unavailing, they would sweep down on his little principality
like robbers on a child. For that, however, his period of exile
had suggested a remedy. After he had lost his throne in his
boyhood he had first gone to live with his father among the Serbs
of Hungary. He had visited the shrines of the Frushka Gora
and had seen the relics of his people’s ancient glory. Among the
Serb scholars of Novi Sad and Budapest and Vienna he had
learned how real these glories had been, how certainly the
medieval Serbian Empire had been begotten by Byzantine
civilisation, and how near it had come to being heir and trans-
mitter of that civilisation, prevented only by the coming of the
Turks. He learned enough to know that in the past the struggle
for power in the Balkans had swung from east to west, and
from west to east, and victory had rested now with the Serbs,
now with the Bulgarians. The Bulgarians were a people of
other than Slav origin, being akin to the Turks and Hungarians
and Finns, but they were interpenetrated with Slav blood and
spoke a Slav language. Now they had another bond with the

SERBIA

551

Serbs, they had been conquered by the Turks ; and they were
still enslaved. Michael believed that it would be a glorious
thing to unite the South Slav peoples. The independent state
of Montenegro would certainly be his ally ; and since he could
not join hands with the Croatians and Dalmatians and Hungarian
Serbs because they were under the vigorous tyranny of the
Austro-Hungarian Empire, it would perhaps be wiser to link
up with the Bulgarians, who would be more accessible than
the others because of the inefficiency of the Turkish administra-
tion, and for the same reason more eager for emancipating
friends. Then again should there be a vast area, solidly Slav,
magnificently free.

This dream, which was bom of poetic and historical imagina-
tion, was immediately expanded by Michael’s practical sense.
Why should not past and present experience of Turkish oppres-
sion bind together small states, even though they were not Slav,
into an effective union that should destroy the Turk ? He
planned a Balkan League that should join Serbia and Monte-
negro with Greece, which indeed was full of Slav blood, and
Roumania, and should receive the Bulgarians, the Bosnians
and Herzegovinians, the Macedonians and the Hungarian
Serbs, as soon as these revolted against their oppressors. He
actually came to an understanding with Greece and Roumania,
and sent Serbian propagandists to work among all the enslaved
Slav peoples, while he increased his military strength at home.
A check was sharply applied to his plan when England and
France, with incredible fatuity, joined Austro-Hungary in
rebuking him. It is difficult to imagine why they did this, for
a young and prosperous Balkan League able to defend itself
must have been a most powerful factor for European peace.
The Great War of 1914 could never have happened if Austria
had had on her east a solid wall of people able to protect them-
selves, and had therefore had to accept her limitations. But
so it was, and Michael had to neglect obvious opportunities for
fulfilling his programme. He was about to fill in the time by
revising his constitution and making it more democratic when,
on the tenth of June 1868, he went for a walk in the Topchider,
the delightful park outside Belgrade that looks across the river
Sava at the town on its great ridge of rock. He was accompanied
by his cousin and her daughter Katarina, a lame girl of brilliant
intellect, with whom, it is said, he was in love, but whom he

BLACK LAMB AND GREY FALCON

553

could not marry because the kinship was within the degree
prohibited by the Orthodox Church. He had some time before
been divorced, for reasons which are still mysterious, from his
Hungarian wife, Julia Hunyadi, who subsequently married the
Duke of Ahremberg and died in Vienna fifty-one years later, in
1919. Three men came up to the party and attacked all three
with knives. Katarina was wounded, her mother and Prince
Michael were killed. Again the Great War was brought nearer to
us, another wall between us and that catastrophe was pulled down.

It has been alleged that this assassination was the work of
Alexander Karageorgevitch, and indeed he was tried in absentia
by a Serbian court and condemned. But no evidence was called
which was worth a straw. It is not easy to believe that this man,
who was now sixty-one, and who had never been ambitious and
was completely aware of his own unpopularity, decided to kill
his successor, whom he knew to be adored by his people, and
reclaim the throne at a time when a vast and exacting pro-
gramme had been begun and would have to be triumphantly
accomplished by any prince who wanted to save his neck. It
is still more difficult to believe that Alexander Karageorgevitch
arranged the assassination yet took no steps to seize the power
of the murdered man, and, indeed, never left his estate in
Hungary before or after the crime.

Alexander followed this up by an even stranger omission.
Michael’s marriage had been childless, and the Serbian Cabinet
was forced into proclaiming as ruler young Milan, a boy of
thirteen, the grandson of one of Milosh’s brothers. The
relationship was uninspiring in its remoteness, and indeed there
were suspicions that it was actually non-existent. But Alexander
Karageorgevitch never appeared to take advantage of the count-
less opportunities offered him or any other malcontent during
the boy’s minority. The assassins may have called themselves
partisans of the Karageorgevitches ; and the Karageorgevitches
certainly had partisans. Everybody at odds with Michael’s
administration, which was far too efficient to satisfy everybody,
used to take trips to see Alexander Karageorgevitch and grumble
over endless black coffees. But they were most likely to do this if
they were old and remembered the good old days of corruption.
The assassins of Michael Obrenovitch were young and vigorous ;
they were known to have relations with the Austrian police,
and it was Austria who profited by Michael’s death.

SERBIA

553

Belgrade V

Every Slav heart grieved at Michael's death ; and ap-
parently the powers that are not to be seen were also perturbed.
At noon on the ninth of June 1868, a peasant called Mata, or
Matthew, ran through the streets of a town called Uzhitse
crying out : " Brothers I brothers I Rise up and save our
Prince I They are cruelly murdering him 1 Look, they are
slashing him with yataghans ! Look, look the blood ! Help
him, help him.” The police thought he had gone mad and
arrested him ; but his position looked more serious when next
day there reached Uzhitse the news that Michael had been
stabbed to death in Topchidcr. Matthew was examined by the
Mayor on the assumption that he must have been concerned in
the conspiracy ; but he was able to prove that nothing was less
probable, and the whole countryside came forward to bear
witness that he was a seer and often foretold events that had not
yet happened or were happening far away. The Mayor then
told Mata to say what he saw of the future, and had a secretary
to take it down in writing ; and he was so impressed that he
sent the notes up to the Minister of the Interior. The Minister
also was impressed. He ordered Matthew to be brought to
Belgrade, and for some days the man sat in a room in the
Foreign Office dictating to an official. The notes were filed in
the archives, and only disclosed gradually to persons connected
with the court or cabinet. But the notes taken by the Mayor
of Uzhitse were not so well guarded. They became common
knowledge and were finally published and sold all over the
country.

Mata foresaw all of Balkan history for the next fifty years.
He said : “ Michael will be succeeded by a child, and for a time
the country will be governed by three Regents. When he comes
of age all will go ill. He is clever but unstable, and he will be a
torment to Serbia, which will know nothing of peace or security
so long as he is on the throne. He will lead several wars, will
enlarge the country ; and will be more than a prince, he will
be a king. But there will always be trouble. Finally he will
abdicate and die in exile before he is old. He will leave but one
son, bom of a detested wife. This son will mean even more
suffering to Serbia. His rule will plunge the country into

554 BLACK LAMB AND GRBT FALCON

disorder, and he too will make a disastrous marriage. Bef<M% the
thirtieth year he will be dead, and his family will die with him.
Another family will come to reign in Serbia ; but the new king
will disappear after three years and then there will be ag^ny
unspeakable for our people. There will be revolts and blood-
shed, and then a foreign power will invade our country. That
foreign power will torture us. There will come such sad and
hard times that those who are living will say when they pass a
churchyard, ‘ Oh graves, open that we may lie down and rest.
Oh, how happy are you who have died and are saved from our
troubles and misfortunes ! ’ But a better time will come. . . .”

He said other things, not yet fulfilled, which explain why
nowadays one cannot buy the Prophecies of Mata of Krema.
It is no wonder that those who are threatened by them are
apprehensive, for all that he said of Milan and his son came
true. Milan was an unqualified disaster to his country. It is
possible that he was not an Obrenovitch at all. His mother was
a noble and beautiful and indecorous Roumanian, and there
was some doubt as to whether his father also was not Roumanian,
and the Obrcnovitchcs in no way involved. When Milan was
presented to the Skupshtina on coming of age, one of the
deputies stayed in his seat and explained that he did not intend
to rise till he had seen the young man’s birth certificate. In any
case, even had Milan been an Obrenovitch his upbringing would
have prevented him from behaving like one. Their courage
and vitality and craft were theirs only because they had lived
the life of peasant soldiers. But Milan spent his childhood in
not quite the best palace hotels of Paris and Vienna and Belgrade
and Bucharest, alternately petted and neglected by parents who
detested each other. Although it must have been realised how
likely it was that he should succeed Michael, nobody seems to
have regarded his education as a matter of any importance.
He grew up with no virtue except an extreme aesthetic sensibility,
which would have been revolted could he have caught sight of
himself. In mind and body he was the perfect rastaqtuniire.

His marriage was indeed as disastrous as Mata had foretold.
When he was nineteen, while his Ministers were negotiating
with St. Petersburg to secure him the hand of a young Russian
princess, he announced his engagement to Mademoiselle
Natalia Keshko, the daughter of a Russian colonel belonging
to the lesser ranks of the Moldavian nobility, who was a strange

SERBIA

555

mixture of Slav and Roumanian and Levantine. As the couple
left the Cathedral after their wedding a thunderstorm broke
over Belgrade and the horses of the state carriage reared and
bolted. The omen was not excessive. Natalia was a detestable
child, and cruel to the child she had married. When he showed
her the peculiar best of himself she answered with a sneer.
Because he once heard her say she liked lilies of the valley he
had a whole field planted with them, which is a gesture a
rastaquouire might make if stirred to his depths. When he
took her to see them at the perfect moment of their flowering
she was puzzled and annoyed by this extravagance. A whole
field of lilies of the valley ! This coldness she manifested in all
phases of their common life. Violently aphrodisiac in appear-
ance, with the immense liquid leaf-shaped eyes and the voluptu-
ous smoothness of the ideal odalisque, she bore within her the
conventionality of the kind of Russian provincial society that is
described in some of Tolstoy and much of Tchekov, and she
deeply resented her husband’s passion. They had but one
child, Alexander, born when its father was twenty-one and its
mother twenty. Thereafter Milan took a mistress, an ugly and
intelligent Levantine Greek ten years older than himself, who
was perhaps a Russian agent. Natalia, who was at once narrow
and loose, knew no restraint in her public resentment of this
situation, particularly when this mistress gave birth to a son.
Belgrade was startled and shocked by the public brawls of their
prince and his wife. These were not peasant manners, but they
were not fine manners either.

As a ruler Milan was not less a failure than as a husband.
When the Bosnians and Herzegovinians revolted against Turkey
he marched against the Turks from the north while Prince
Nicholas of Montenegro marched on them from the south-west.
Prince Nicholas made a brilliant success, and wrung an
advantageous peace treaty out of them. Milan failed, and had
to be saved from disaster by Russian intervention. That started
a movement in Serbia for the dethronement of Milan in favour
of Prince Nicholas, which soon lost its vigour owing to the
flaws that were evident in the Montenegrin's character whenever
he stopped fighting ; and it started a much more lively and
lasting movement in favour of recalling Peter Karageorgevitch,
who had fought with the Bosnian rebels and shown himself
remarkable as a soldier and as a man. It is hard to blame

556 BLACK LAMB AND GREY FALCON

Milan either for his defeat or for the steps he took to remedy it.
He was only twenty-one when he led out his troops against
Turkey ; and in a modem and orderly state genius has no
chance to be precocious. If he had lived in the Old Serbia of
Karageorge and Milosh he would have been fighting since he
was fifteen or sixteen, and would have known that to keep his
throne he had to placate or outwit a dozen wily old chiefs, and
in either case earn their respect as well. That was the training
Michael Obrenovitch had had ; it was ironic that it had enabled
him to sweep away such barbaric conditions, which as it proved
were apparently necessary to equip a Serbian ruler, his heir
not excepted, for the difficult task of modernising his state.

A later campaign against the Turks was more satisfactory.
But at treaty-making Milan was pitifully incompetent. He let
the Treaty of San Stefano, which was signed between the Russians
and Turks in 1878, take a form which inevitably was to destroy
Michael Obrenovitch's dream of a union of the South Slavs for
many years and perhaps for ever ; for he did not prevent Russia
giving her vassal state, Bulgaria, extended boundaries to which
not only the Serbs but the Greeks could legitimately object.
The Balkan League was split in three before it was founded.
Then came the infamous Congress of Berlin, which was called
for no other reason than to frame a treaty which should deprive
the democratic Slavs of their freedom and thrust them into
subjection under the imperialism of Turkey and Austro-
Hungary. Without the Balkan League to use as a counter
Milan was utterly helpless, he was back in the position of poor
Alexander Karageorgevitch.

It is not to be wondered at that in 1881 Milan signed a
secret convention with Austria which handed over his country
to be an Austrian dependency. He promised not to make any
effort to redeem the Bosnians and Herzegovinians, in return for
a vague promise of support for a war, which he was not likely
ever to declare, against the Turks in Macedonia, and he agreed
to submit his policy day by day to Austrian control. The
Austrian military attache in Belgrade used to call at the palace
and give Milan his orders. It is suspected that Milan received,
directly or indirectly, financial recompense for this treachery.
This increased the dishonour of the transaction ; but it would
be superficial to take it as proof that Milan’s motives were
simply mercenary. There can be no doubt that he was chiefly

SERBIA

557

moved by his sense that the great aggressive empires of Turkey,
Russia and Austria made it impossible for him to give his
country that independence which it thought it his duty to
guarantee.

A year after Milan sold his country down the river, down
the Danube, he proclaimed himself king, and had himself
anointed in the ancient church of Zhitcha, where all the Neman-
yan dynasty had been crowned. It is a crimson church which
stands among land like the fairest parts of the Lake District,
solemnly dedicated to its royal ritual. A new door was pierced
in the wall for each king to come to his coronation, and on his
going out it was bricked up again. The people were not
placated by Milan’s elevation. He was notoriously given to
drunkenness, he was spendthrift to the point of mania, his
relations with his wife were already scandalous ; and owing to
his secret convention with Austro-Hungary his political conduct
looked like the caprice of a lunatic. Most of his Ministers and
all of the public had no idea of the agreement, and they were
therefore completely mystified when, as constantly happened,
their king suddenly abandoned a project which he had fully
approved and which was indeed plainly in the interests of Serbia,
or when he put forward a plan which appeared meaningless
because its context was known only in the Ballplatz. It is
typical of Austrian Schlamperei that those who gave Milan his
orders took no trouble whatsoever to make them such as he
could obey without coming to loggerheads with his people.
In 1883 certain districts rose in rebellion which was savagely
suppressed.

When little Alexander was nine years old his father and
mother separated with the utmost indecency. Their venomous
hatred and bad manners were such as Strindberg describes in
his play Divorce. Natalia on one occasion abominably kid-
napped the child and took him to Wiesbaden, and Milan equally
abominably had him brought back by the German police.
The only respite in these brawls was due to Milan’s imbecile
declaration of war against Bulgaria, which led to a disgraceful
defeat in 1886. By 1888 Milan had exhausted all other means
of persecuting his wife and conceived the idea that he must
divorce her, though he had no grounds whatsoever, for she was
entirely virtuous. He persuaded the Serbian Primate to regard
as precedents certain cases of Russian Tsars who had been

558 BLACK LAMB AND GREY FALCON

divorced by simple edicts of the Metropolitans. This deeply
shocked his people, who now knew that their king was a
thoroughly bad lot. His treasury was incessantly faced with
cheques he had cashed in nearly every capital in Europe and
with dunning letters from money-lenders ; and his military
defeat meant even more in a Balkan country than it would have
in the West. It was apparent that even if Milan was contented
with the situation his backers were not. In January 1890 he
tried placating his subjects by giving them a Liberal constitu-
tion, but three months afterwards, abruptly and without ex-
planation, he abdicated in favour of his son, who was only
twelve years old. It is probable that the new constitution and
the abdication were Austrian attempts at coping with the
steadily increasing interest that Serbia felt in the sober per-
sonality of Peter Karageorgevitch, who would certainly never
be amenable to foreign influence if he ascended the throne.

The boy Alexander ruled until his majority through three
Regents, two of whom were military men known as " the
tarnished generals ” since certain unlucky incidents in the war
against Bulgaria, while the third was a political boss who had
always been Milan’s henchman. They were hardly ideal sub-
stitutes for a father and a mother, as they very soon had to be.
For Milan insisted when he left his son in their care that he
should never be allowed to see his mother or hold any com-
munication with her. This was probably not purely an act of
domestic hatred. The quarrels between the two seem, particu-
larly towards the end of their dreadful marriage, to have had
some sort of political basis. Natalia was strongly Russophile,
and it is probable that she found out the existence of the secret
convention with Austria. Indeed some of her recorded utter-
ances make it almost certain that she had. It may be that
Milan feared she would impart this knowledge to the boy
before he had the discretion to realise its full consequences.

Whatever the cause of this prohibition, Natalia turned it
to the vulgarest account. She came to Belgrade and used to
stand with her face pressed against the gates, looking up at the
windows to see her adored son, whom she had done little or
nothing to protect. She took a house near by and hung from
a balcony when the young king went by on his daily drive.
She also distributed secretly to the foreign newspaper corre-
spondents information damaging to Serbia which she had

SERBIA 559

learned in her position as queen. Finally the Regents rushed
through Parliament a bill providing that neither King Milan
nor Queen Natalia should be allowed to reside even temporarily
in Serbia. The inclusion of both parents enabled the Regents
to avoid the accusation of partiality ; and indeed they were
probably feeling none too fond of Milan, who had been sent
abroad with a handsome allowance but was running up
enormous debts in Paris and Vienna. Once the Act was passed
the Government asked Natalia to leave Belgrade, and when she
refused they sent a police commissioner and his men to put
her on a Danube steamer. She locked her door and the men
had to climb over the roof to get into her house. They drove
her away in a cab, and her beautiful grief inspired a mob of
young men to make an attempt at rescue. After several of
them had been killed and many wounded, she addressed the
mob and begged them to disperse, declaring that to prevent
any more of this dreadful bloodshed she would leave Belgrade
at once.

When Alexander was seventeen, and a weak-kneed, stout,
spectacled boy, he asked the Regents and the principal Ministers
of the Cabinet to dine with him at the palace. They came to
dinner in high spirits, for they were all Liberals, which is to say
in this confusing country that they were not Liberals at all, but
Tammany politicians with a great deal more machine than
ideology, and they had just pulled off a smart manceuvre against
the Radicals, who here are not Radicals at all but anti-Western,
nationalist, democrat Conservatives who base their pro-
gramme on the ancient Slav communist tendencies growing
out of the Zadruga system. But before they had finished dining
the palace aide-de-camp entered and spoke in a low voice to
the boy, who nodded, rose to his feet, and said, " Gentlemen,
it is announced to all the garrisons in Serbia, to all the authori-
ties, and to the people, and I announce it here to you, that I
declare myself of full age, and that I now take the government
of the country into my own hands. I thank you, my Regents,
for your services, of which I now relieve you. I thank you
also, gentlemen of the Cabinet, for your services, of which you
are relieved also. You will not be allowed to leave this palace
to-night. You can remain here as my guests, but if not, then
as my prisoners."

For a second the men were silent, then they jumped up and

56o black lamb AND GREY FALCON

hurried round the table towards the boy, crying out threats and
protests. The aide-de-camp drew his sword and stopped them,
then went silently to the folding doors on one side of the room
and threw them open. Bayonets glittered on the rifles of a
company of soldiers. “ I leave you in charge of Lieutenant-
Colonel .Tyirich, whose orders you will have implicitly to obey,
while I go to give the oath of fidelity to the Army,” said the
King, and he left the hall. Next morning the Regents and the
Ministers were released, and went home through streets pla-
carded with Royal Proclamations stating that King Alexander
had watched the illegal actions of the Liberal Government, and
feared that if they had been suffered to continue the country
would drift into civil war, and therefore had declared himself
of age and taken the reins of power into his hands. The people
came out of their houses, read the Proclamation, ran back and
hung out their flags, and then rushed to the courtyard before
the palace to cheer the Obrenovitch who after all had shown
himself an Obrenovitch.

There is but one explanation of this incident and the anti-
climax that followed it ; there can be only one reason why
Alexander made this superb gesture and then never another,
why he afterwards only acted as if he wished to surpass his
father in caprice and cruelty towards his subjects. The clue
is given by an utterance he made concerning this secret Con-
vention with Austria, and by certain of his actions which are
apparently conflicting. There seems to be no doubt that later
he spoke of his father’s signature to the Convention as " an act
of treason ”. At the time of his coup d’etat he called the national-
ist, democratic, anti-Western Radicals to power. But only a
year later he illegally removed the Radicals from power, and
later he annulled the constitutional reforms of the past twenty
years, suppressed the freedom of speech and freedom of the
press, and governed with the Parliamentary help of an insignifi-
cant pro-Austrian party called the Progressives. Yet all this
time Alexander was on the most affectionate terms with his
mother, Natalia, who was pro-Radical and pro- Russian, and
he frequently left the country to spend holidays with her, which
were apparently not marred by any differences of opinion.
Finally, to the country's amazement and rage, he recalled his
father from his scandalous life abroad and made him Com-
mander-in-chief. This was not altogether a disaster. Milan

SERBIA

S6i

was far from being a fool. In between his orgies in Paris he
had acquired a superb collection of pictures by the yet unrecog-
nised masters of the nineteenth century ; some of the finest
C^zannes once belonged to him. And though he had not been
a successful general on the field, his sense of style made him an
excellent organiser of a peace-time army. But he took his fun
in persecuting the Radicals and pro-Russians, many of whom
he did to death. Serbia had never sunk lower since its founda-
tion as a state.

These incidents fall into a comprehensible pattern if certain
assumptions are made for which there is some independent
evidence. It happened that in 1892 a copy of the secret Con-
vention had fallen into the hands of a Serbian nationalist and
patriot. Prince Lazarovitch Hrbelianovitch, a descendant of the
Tsar Lazar, and he had communicated it to the European press.
Its existence was explicitly denied, both by the Serbian Regents
and by the Austro-Hungarian Empire through the Parliaments
of both Vienna and Budapest. If Alexander had discovered,
perhaps by some secret communication from Natalia, that the
Convention indeed existed, it might well be that his young
idealism revolted and he decided to appear before his country
as their deliverer from the hidden tyrant. That would explain
why he drove out his Regents and assumed power a year
before the proper time, and why he favoured the anti-Austrian
Radicals. But his first conversation with the Austrian Minister
would show him the reality of the fear that had paralysed
Alexander Karageorgevitch and disintegrated his own father.
He was probably told that any public disclosure and repudiation
of the Convention would be treated as an unfriendly act by
Austria and would be followed by an invasion, or by his murder
and replacement by a Karageorgevitch. The boy, sobered,
would try to compromise. He would keep silent about the
Convention, but he would continue his support of the Radi-
cals. Austrian pressure slowly increased. Every year that
Alexander reigned without disclosing the Convention to his
people put him in a worse position to assert his independence.
He could not turn to his country and demand its support in
his war against the foreign oppressor when it could be proved
that he had for long been acting as the oppressor’s agent. So
he was forced backwards along a dark corridor, a pistol at his
breast, to meet an unknown and horrid end, till suddenly he

562 BLACK LAMB AND GREY FALCON

stopped. He struck the pistol away from the hand that held it,
careless whether it might be picked up again or not. He had
fallen in love with a woman who was Serbian and pro-Russian.

Belgrade VI

By now the Serbians were deeply unhappy. They were a
people who had lived by a tradition that had never failed them
for five hundred years, that had never let them forget how much
fairer than all the conquering might of Islam their Christian
knightliness had been. They had lived by St. Sava and Stephen
Dushan, by the King Marko and the Tsar Lazar. But Milan
and Alexander Obrenovitch, who were perhaps not Obreno-
vitches at all, nor even Serbians, and who were entirely and
essentially nineteenth century, to such a degree that they both
might have been minor characters in Proust, cannot possibly
have been even faintly interested in these medieval personages.
Milan was infatuated with the modern West, and he had sur-
rounded himself with people who shared his infatuation and
expressed it in ways less admirable than the purchase of
Cezannes. His favourite Foreign Minister, Chedomile Miyato-
vitch, who supported him in the signature of the secret Conven-
tion with Austria, once wrote a book on Serbia in which he
speaks very ill of the Serbian Church. In shocked accents he
tells how he took some “ distinguished English gentlemen ” to
an ancient monastery and found there the Bishop of Nish,
who bade him tell his friends “ that it would be much better if,
instead of sending us Bibles, they were to send us some guns
and cannons ”. This was an answer which, of course, might
have come from any Bishop of the Early Church. Leave to us
the instruction of the people, it says, and help us to wage war
against the heathen that sell the baptized into captivity. There
were many such captives over the Serbian frontiers, in the
hands of the Turks, not possibly to be redeemed until there was
again a strong Christian power in the Balkans. Men like
Miyatovitch wanted the Serbians to lay aside this grandiose
subject matter which their destiny had given them for their
genius to work upon; and instead they offered them, as an
alternative, to be clean and briskly bureaucratic and capitalist
like the West. It was as if the Mayflower and Red Indians and

SERBIA

563

George Washingfton and the pioneer West were taken from the
United States, and there was nothing left but the Bronx and
Park Avenue.

The Serbian tradition was not killed. The Serbians did
not forget the field of Kossovo. Simply they felt that every day
Kossovo was desecrated by the indifference of the father and
son who governed them in this curious unconstitutional partner-
ship. They were also conscious, though they did not openly
admit it, that they could not even flatter themselves that they
were really governed by this pair. It is impossible that the
interpretation of Alexander's capricious and terrified despotism
should have escaped a people so subtle, so politically experienced
and so suspicious. But to admit it would have involved recogni-
tion that Serbia could never be independent, that though it
had freed itself from Turkey now it must fall under the tutelage
of Austria or Russia : and that was to insult the Tsar Lazar,
to leave the defeat of Kossovo unredeemed for ever. The
Serbians became moody, hallucinated, creative ; and the real
persecution they suffered at the hands of the anti-Russian and
anti-Radical agents sent out by Milan tinged their fantasies
with a certain colour, a certain brooding, cryptic violence.

When Alexander Obrenovitch was a little boy he and his
tutor had often walked in the Royal Park outside Belgrade with
an American newspaper correspondent named Stephen Bonsai
and an English military attach^ named Douglas Dawson, who
was later to be the Controller of the Household of King George
the Fifth. One day the two foreigners talked of the delights
of swimming in the Danube, and they were shocked to find that
the little boy could not swim. So they found him a pool among
the trees, and in spite of the tutor’s protests they gave him the
first swimming lesson. They were distressed to see how badly
the boy stripped. He was mis-shapen and top-heavy, with
clumsy shoulders and long arms, meagre loins and thighs, and
knock-knees. As soon as he could cross the pool, which was
about thirty feet wide, he said proudly to his unhappy tutor,
“ Now you need not worry about telling the Regents that I am
being given swimming lessons by these gentlemen, who are my
friends. You can tell them that the King can swim.”

Alexander never lost his delight in swimming. When he
visited his mother at her home in Biarritz, as he did regularly
after his dismissal of the Regents, he spent much of his time in

564 BLACK LAMB AND GREY FALCON

the sea or lying on the sands in the sunshine. One of his
companions was Queen Natalia’s chief lady-in-waiting, a very
pretty widow, ten years older than himself, named Draga Mashin.
With her, as time went on, he fell deeply in love. She was
the first woman in whom he had shown any interest. His
reluctance to marry and his distaste for feminine society had led
it to be generally believed that he was physiologically defective.
But some time between the years 1894 and 1897 his passion
for her became so overwhelming that he forced his way into her
bedroom at night. She, however, took him by the shoulders,
turned him out and locked the door. This is regarded by her
enemies as proof of her subtle guile, but according to the
King’s own account she used a degree of muscular strength
far greater than a designing woman would risk. Alexander
came near to being in a position where he could say, " Perhaps
you were right to dissemble your love, but why did you kick
me downstairs ? ”

After this the story becomes obscure. Some time in the
autumn of 1 897 Queen Natalia discovered a letter from Alexander
to Draga, and flew into a rage most curious in a middle-aged
woman of great social experience. It is not clear why she was
angry with Draga, who, however indiscreet she had been to
evoke the letter, had answered it with the extreme discretion of
staying where she was instead of going to Belgrade. But
Natalia at once dismissed Draga, turned her out of the house,
and sat down to write to all her friends that her lady-in-waiting
had behaved to her like a traitress and a wanton. This at once
threw Draga on her own resources, which amounted to about a
hundred pounds a year, and closed to her the only circle where
she might have found fresh employment. She was therefore
obliged to return to her family in Belgrade. Queen Natalia, in
fact, had made inevitable the relationship which she affected
to loathe. For this reason some have suspected her of finding
an ingenious device for planting a pro-Russian agent in her
son’s court and looking as if she were doing no such thing. But
the suspicion is unfounded, for she evidently conceived a real
resentment against her son, and never saw him again. There is
no reason to see anything here but the tropisms of a stupid and
vulgar woman.

It is hard to imagine a life more complicated than young
Alexander’s in the winter of 1897. His father, to whom he had

SERBIA

565

become more attached since his quarrel with his mother, and
who had only lately returned to the country as Commander-in-
chief, had already begun to embarrass him as a Serbian patriot
by pro-Austrian activities. Alexander went for a holiday to
Merano, where Draga was staying, though she was still, accord-
ing to his later and convincing accounts, not yet his mistress ;
and there he was visited by the Russian diplomat Isvolsky,
then en paste in Bavaria, who fully realised the extent to which
he was anti-Austrian and might become pro-Russian, and
reported to his superiors that, although Draga had caused a
breach between the young King and his pro-Russian mother,
she was herself a pro-Russian influence. It seems probable that
he arranged for certain transactions to be carried on through
the mediation of Draga, in order to shield them from the
observation of Alexander's father. This extreme intricacy of
relationship was just what might have stirred the interest and
sympathy of the Serbian people, but it had to be kept secret.
^ Alexander and Draga went back to Belgrade, to all appear-
ances in the excessively simple characters of a tyrannous king
and his venal mistress.

It is still not known when the reality came to correspond
with the popular belief. Alexander declared it was three years
after the night when she had turned him out of her bedroom at
Biarritz, but that scene may have occurred any time between
1894 and 1897. It is possible that she did not surrender to
him till long after her return to Belgrade, perhaps only a short
time before their marriage in the 'summer of 1900. But the
people had no reason to guess at the unexpected purity of their
relationship. Draga lived in a pretty little house near the palace
in a style which was plainly not within the reach of her own
resources, and she was constantly visited by the King. They
naturally concluded that she was his mistress ; but the feeling
aroused by their conclusion was not natural. Before long she
was hated as few women since the beginning of time, as no
cruel mother, as no murderess, has ever been loathed. I have
heard of a Serbian scholar, born beyond the Danube, in
Hungary, whose great work was crowned by the Belgrade
Academy. Though he was a passionate patriot and free Serbia
was sacred soil to him, he would not come to claim his honour.
To him Belgrade was utterly polluted by the presence of Draga.

All over Europe spread this campaign of defamation ; when
VOL. I 2 0

S66 BLACK LAMB AND GREY FALCON

the King married her not a country but looked down its nose.
She was supposed to be a woman of low origin who had led a
vicious life, and this impression was confirmed by the current
photographs of her, which showed a bloated face, coarsening
around the jaw. But there are other things than dissipation
that thicken the features. Tears, for example. Certainly the
first part of the story was not true, for she was by birth the equal
of the Obrenovitches. Her grandfather, Nikola Lunyevitza,
was a friend of Milosh Obrenovitch, a very prosperous cattle-
breeder, who had ruined himself financing the rebellions against
the Turks. Her more immediate antecedents had been painful,
but quite respectable. Her father had died in a lunatic asylum,
but till he went mad he had been an efficient and popular Prefect
of Shabats. His collapse had left a large family poorly pro-
vided for, and Draga, who was one of the elder children,
married at seventeen a mining engineer and civil servant. He
was himself a worthless and depraved person, but he came of a
quite successful family ; his father was a noted doctor and one
of his brothers had risen high in the Army.

There is an overwhelming consensus of opinion that there
is no defence possible in the second part of the story. It is still
held by the mass of people to-day in Serbia that she unquestion-
ably had had many lovers before Alexander, and that she might
fairly be called a woman of loose life. Though it is always rash
to challenge such unanimous certainties, the student must
wonder where and when Draga Mashin was able to live loosely.
She was born in 1866. She married her husband some time
before her eighteenth birthday in 1884. He immediately fell ill
with a disorder due to alcoholism, and she nursed him, except
during periods when she had to flee from his ill-treatment, till
his death in 1885. When she became a widow she was left
badly off, but not so badly off that she could not buy food and
shelter ; and her unfortunate position attracted the attention of
Queen Natalia, who had her taught foreign languages and
prepared for her duties as a lady-in-waiting. She was so
constantly in attendance at the palace during this time that it
was rumoured she was King Milan’s mistress, although in fact
King Milan hated her. In 1 889 she began to travel about with
Queen Natalia, and from 1890 lived under her roof at Biarritz.
Her bad reputation can be taken as deserved only if it is
accepted that from 1885 to 1889, between the ages of nineteen

SBRBIA

567

and twenty-three, she conducted herself so licentiously in
Belgrade that it was still remembered in 1897. But Queen
Natalia was chaster than snow, she was as chaste as sleet, and
she was np more likely than Queen Victoria to have a woman of
damaged reputation as her personal attendant. She was also
noted for knowing everything that went on in Belgrade. If
there existed in 1885 stories about Draga so rich and strange
that they survived eight years of absence, it seems odd that
Queen Natalia never heard them. It seems odder still that a
young woman who had spent her youth in the arms of innumer-
able lovers should at the age of twenty-three be willing to take
up her quarters for the rest of her life in what was virtually the
nunnery of Queen Natalia’s court, particularly when she was so
beautiful that she could have set up as a cocotte in any capital
of Europe.

There are discrepancies here which cannot be reconciled.
We may be warned by the puerility of the case against her.
Vladan Georgevitch, an unlovable personality who was Pro-
gressist Prime Minister and accused by his enemies of terrorism
and theft of state papers, was driven to denouncing her for lend-
ing one of his family an immoral book by a Russian Nihilist : it
was Mr. Gladstone’s favourite, the Journal of Maria BashkirtseflF.
It seems as if it might be wiser to pay heed to the curiously
sober and lethargic expression noticeable even in the earliest
photographs of Draga, and accept their indication that a woman
who has known at the age of nineteen what it is to have an
insane father and an alcoholic husband may develop a certain
caution about the exploration of life. Her bad reputation had
probably two sources : one limited though effective in a highly
important sphere, the other unconfined as a comet, the poetry
in the heart of the people, catching fire from a fiery destiny.

It has already been said that Draga Mashin had a brother-in-
law in the Army : Colonel Alexander Mashin. He and most of
his family hated her. It is hard to believe that this hatred can
have been justified. A girl of seventeen cannot have offended
greatly against a husband, much older than herself, who during
their brief year of married life was suffering from the effects of
alcoholic excess. It is likely that this emotion sprung from the
reluctance of obstinate people to humble themselves before a
stranger to whom one of their kind has done an injury. To
Colonel Mashin this hatred was bound to seem justified when

S68 BLACK LAMB AND GREY FALCON

she became Alexander’s mistress, for he was a partisan of the
Karageorgevitches, though he had also received great kindness
from King Milan. There is no doubt that Colonel Mashin, who
was a good soldier and very popular in the Army, widely dis-
seminated his sincere belief that she was abominable.

For the rest, the people hated Alexander Obrenovitch
because he had taken from them their dream of avenging
Kossovo, because he had destroyed the integrity of their free
state, because he was laying low the representatives of their
ancient ways, because he was vulgarising their style, their
austere Byzantine splendour, which made their men gaunt and
minatory, their women still and patient, like the ancient kings
and holy personages in the frescoes. Because the woman a
man loves is in a sense his soul, or at any rate the answer to the
call it makes, they thought of Draga as Alexander’s soul, and
therefore their enemy, and therefore utterly evil, as all of us in
our simplicity conceive our enemies.

It is certain that she was aware of the people’s hatred and
was full of fear. It looks as if, with a not unnatural cynicism,
she thought that her lover’s passion would pass and that she
would then be free. It is said that he gave her twenty thousand
pounds ; and it is probable that she hoped to spend the rest of
her life quietly in some French watering-place, where there was
a casino at the end of an esplanade planted with palms, and pink
villas with jalousies. This vision might well seem heavenly, for
Balkan politics were thickening round her to a nightmare. In
February 1 899 the Austrian influence in the court, of which the
chief representative was King Milan, insisted on a suspension
of relations with Russia. In July of the same year King Milan
was driving from the Belgrade fortress to the palace when a
young man stepped forward and fired a revolver at him. The
assassin was a revolutionary Russophile Bosnian. Like all his
kind save Princip, he missed. King Milan used the event as a
pretext for throwing many of his personal and political enemies
into jail, but he, and several of the Ministers who were in the
best position to form an opinion, believed that it was his son
Alexander who had employed the assassin.

It is not easy to visualise family life as it was lived in the
palace at Belgrade during this period. However, calm was
apparently restored, and Alexander shuffled along quietly
enough under instructions from Vienna until March 1900, when

SERBIA

S6g

Count Goluchowski, the Austrian Foreign Minister, was un-
fortunately inspired to send him a peremptory demand that he
should marry a German princess without delay. This was
typical of the extraordinary incompetence which the Austro-
Hungarian Empire always showed in its dealings with Serbia.
It was notorious that Alexander was still passionately in love
with his mistress, and as he was not yet twenty-four years of
age there was no reason whatsoever to hurry him into marriage.
But Alexander's Ministers obeyed the orders from Vienna and
extracted from him a promise that he would marry before the
year was out. They lacked the sound common sense of the
Chief of the Belgrade Police, a simple peasant who believed
that Draga owed her power over Alexander to magic potions.
When he heard of the promise he blurted out, “ Here, what’s
this ? We all know that this creature has bewitched the King
so thoroughly that he firmly believes that he couldn’t even be a
husband to another woman. If he has promised you to marry
within the year, he means to marry Draga Mashin.”

He was right. On July the eighth Alexander announced
to the world his intention of marrying his mistress. He chose
a moment when both his father and his Prime Minister were on
holiday in different parts of the Continent. As he had taken the
precaution of ordering them to be supplied with different code
books, they wasted a great deal of time after hearing the news in
sending each other incomprehensible messages. But at home
he had immediately to face a flood of opposition not to be
deflected by such easy means. We know how he met it in one
case. He addressed one of his Ministers in terms which were
drawn from the common language of lovers, which we may even
recognise as having been used in our own times by other lips.

" You know, Vukashin," he said, " that I have had neither
childhood nor youth like other men. ... I have never had any
ambition, not even the ambition to reign as a King. I wear the
crown, not because I love it, but because it is my duty to do so.
You must have noticed that yourself. . . . There now exists a
woman whom I love more than anyone or anything in this
world, the only woman with whom I can be perfectly happy,
and only then can I consecrate my whole life to the interests of
the people if she becomes my wife. In the whole world there is
only one woman who can make me forget the bitterness of my
past life, and make me feel happy. This woman has been

570 BLACK LAMB AND GREY FALCON

hitherto my good angel, who gave me strength to bear patiently
all that I had to bear. That woman is — Madame Draga, the
daughter of Panta Lunyevitza. ... I am inflexibly resolved to
marry her. Don’t insult me by attacks on her. . . . She is a
pure and honourable woman, and only her enemies speak badly
of her. . . . Only after she received proof that without her and
her love I could not live, did she sacrifice herself to me. Yes,
I am passionately in love with her, and without her I cannot
live. There is now no power on earth which could prevent me
marrying Draga, whatever the consequences may be. I would
prefer to give up my crown and live with Draga, on an income
of three hundred and sixty pounds a year, than have the throne
and an appanage of forty-eight thousand pounds a year. I
knew that my marriage with her would meet with extraordinary
difficulties, therefore I have surrendered myself to her, body and
soul, and therefore I have made it impossible for her to leave
me. You ought to know that she persistently refused to become
Queen. I alone know what difficulties I have had to gain her
consent. And now, after I have at last broken down her resist-
ance, you come and make difficulties I Have you no pity for
me ? Do you wish to force me to go away for ever ? Because
you ought to realise that if I cannot marry Draga as King, 1
will leave Serbia for ever, and marry her as a private individual.”

His Ministers were unmoved by his eloquence. The whole
country was filled by the news of the approaching marriage, by a
black horror such as they would not have felt at a threat of
invasion by the Turks. On the day the King proclaimed his
betrothal to his people the Cabinet resigned, and sent two of
their number to Draga Mashin with the message that she must
leave the country without delay. It was in their minds that if
she refused she must be kidnapped ; and it must have been in
her mind that her life was no longer safe. She consented at
once to their demand, but she not unnaturally asked if she might
not wait till her maid had packed up her clothes and papers,
provided that meanwhile she went to a friend’s house where the
King would not be likely to seek her. Once she had her pos-
sessions, she said, she would gladly cross the river to Hungary.
To this the two Ministers agreed.

But it was then that her tragic origins put out a hand to
drag her down to her doom. She had two younger brothers
who were Army officers. Both seem to have inherited the mental

SERBIA

571

instability of their father. They were flighty, garrulous,
arrogant, extremely indiscreet, and not at all abashed by their
sister’s curious position. There is no doubt that their behaviour
had contributed largely to Draga's unpopularity. It was un-
fortunate that that very morning the worse of the two was with
his sister, and that as she got into her carriage she whispered
to him the name of the friend with whom she was going to take
shelter while her maid packed for her. This was a natural
enough precaution for one who knew herself to be in danger of
kidnapping or death. It was not natural for her brother to
give this name to the King when he called on his mistress two
hours later. He drove at once to Draga’s hiding-place and
brought her home in his own carriage, and there and then put
on her finger a diamond engagement ring, and left her under
a strong armed guard.

For four days the capital was in a turmoil. It is indicative
of the curious standards of this people that deputation after
deputation visited the palace, urging the King not to marry
the woman whom he adored, on the ground that she was old, his
mistress and of depraved habits, and that they were permitted
to depart in impunity. This is not what one would have expected
in a country where freedom of speech and the press had long
been violated. But the Slavs are so inherently democratic that
even under an autocracy there was an admitted right for the
common man to discuss his ruler’s affairs once they entered a
phase of supreme importance. These deputations went away
and formed various schemes for meeting the situation. Some
wanted King Milan to be recalled and put in his son’s place,
others wanted Peter Karageorgevitch, others reverted to the
original plan of exiling Draga, with the added precaution of
putting Alexander under arrest till she was out of the country.
There was no question but that the Army was to prevent the
marriage by a rebellion. It only remained to settle how they
were to do it.

Without any doubt a plan would have been devised which
would have found general support, but on the fifth day an
announcement was issued which hamstrung all opposition to
the King’s marriage. The Tsar Nicholas declared his approval
of the engagement and sent an emissary to congratulate not only
Alexander but Draga. More than that, the Tsar expressed his
readiness to be “ Kum ” at their wedding : the Kum is the

573 BLACK LAMB AND GREY FALCON

chief witness, who plays a more important part in a marriage
celebrated according to the Orthodox rite than any equivalent
figure we know in the West, who is as it were the godparent of
the marital tie. The enemies of Alexander were almost all pro-
Russian. They could no longer oppose him now that he was
obviously transferring his allegiance from Austria to Russia ;
and the marriage showed in quite a different light now that the
Tsar was going to lend it his spiritual authority. A silence fell
on Belgrade, not the less profound because it proceeded from
bewilderment rather than from satisfaction. It had some chance
to settle, for King Milan never returned to Serbia. The Con-
tinental press published a letter which he was supposed to have
sent his son concerning his marriage, but which appears to have
been written for journalistic use ; and he helped the Austrian
authorities in a campaign of libel against Belgrade. His son
directed his generals that if his father attempted to re-enter
Serbia he was to be shot like a mad dog. But this scene, which
would indeed have been not at all a surprising climax to the
family life of the Obrenovitches, was rendered impossible by
Milan’s death in Vienna in 1901. Nothing could have been
more ironical than that his corpse and household possessions
should have been sent to Krushedol on the Frushka Gora,
among the holy Serbian things which had never interested him.
But it can well be understood why the Emperor Franz Josef
sent them there. “ Put them with the rest of the Slav rubbish,"
he may have said. For Milan had failed in his duty of keeping
Serbia as an Austrian dependency, and henceforth he and all
Serbs were hateful and worthless in Hapsburg eyes.

But the silence in Belgrade broke. The public loathing of
Draga had to find words to lift its corroding bitterness out of
the heart. There is no indication that Draga was not an admir-
able wife to Alexander. She seems always to have treated him
with an ungrudging maternal tenderness. There is no record
of her having sided with the world against him by showing
consciousness of his lack of dignity or physical repulsiveness.
But though certain Ministers recognised her virtues this did not
improve her popularity, for there were other counteracting
forces. There was a mysterious event which touched the
primitive instincts of the people. It was commonly believed
that Draga was sterile as a result of a surgical operation. This
does not seem probable. If she had had such an operation while

SERBIA

573

she was in France it seems unlikely that anybody would hear
about it except her immediate family, who would hardly have
broadcast it. This was the nineteenth century, in Belgrade as
an)rwhere else. But it is still more unlikely that it was p^ormed
before she went to France, for it is rarely required by very young
women. It is a little difficult to believe that if it had ever been
performed Draga would have ventured to announce shortly
after her marriage that she was expecting a child, for the
doctors and the nurses who had attended on her would have
become potential dangers, threatening even her life. Further-
more, a famous French gynaecologist examined her and con-
firmed her opinion. Careless as fashionable doctors become,
it is hard to imagine one failing to notice that an expectant
mother lacked a womb ; and it is not likely that he would have
accepted a bribe, or that Alexander, who was in difficulties with
his exchequer, could have raised one.

In the spring of 1901 there were rumours that Draga had
been mistaken or had lied. The Tsar of Russia offered to lend
the court two of his own physicians. Because he had been
" Kum ’’ at the wedding he would have had to be godparent
to the first child, and it is possible that he had heard the gossip
from Belgrade, thought he had been rash in backing the un-
popular pair, and wanted to keep clear of any dubious pro-
ceedings. These two Russian doctors declared that Draga was
not pregnant, but they explained clearly enough that this was
not the result of a surgical operation but of a malady that might
necessitate one. They also explicitly stated that the symptoms
of this malady might easily have misled Draga into believing
herself pregnant, and that the French gynaecologist’s diagnosis
might have been justified at the time when it was made.

The mischief was done. The people’s mind was nursing
an image that it always likes to hate and dandle in its hatred,
the woman who is death, who is a whore and barren. They
were moved to new folk-lore by this story, which troubled them
by allusions to all sorts of dangers specially feared by the blood,
to threats against kingship, to pollution of the race. Before
long it was believed that Draga had been frustrated by the Tsar
in an attempt to palm off as heir to the throne a child belonging
to a sister of hers named Petrovitch. It is quite true that M adame
Petrovitch was pregnant ; and it may ^ true that in panic,
finding her own hopes of pregnancy were false, Draga had

BLACK LAMB AND GREY FALCON

574

thought of a “ warming-pan baby If that were so, only
those who have never felt fear can blame her. Her situation
was daily made more perilous by the conduct of her wretched
brothers, who were certainly insane. The Serbian habit of
expressing high spirits by discharging firearms into the air has
alarmed many travellers, but these two young men indulged
in it in a manner that alarmed even the Serbians. They also
insisted that when they entered a caf6 or restaurant the band
should play the national anthem. If they did not start the
rumour that one or other of them was to be adopted as heir to
the throne, they at least behaved in a way that supported it
and made it seem the beginning of anarchy.

From Draga’s photographs it can be seen that she grew
rapidly stout, old, wooden. A hostile newspaper published a
serial written round the prophecies of Mata of Krema, and she
brooded on the fate that had been foretold for her. She must
have been aware, for she was not a fool, that her husband’s
reign was a tragic catastrophe. The change from dependence
on Austria had done Serbia no whit of good. If Austria gave
Alexander bad advice Russia gave him none at all, and that
was worse, for though he had been on the throne ten years he
had no knowledge of how to govern independently. The
constitutional routine that steadied Russian absolutism was
utterly unknown to him. For too long he had defended his
crown and his very existence by alternate cringing and terrorism,
and he could conceive no other procedure.

In 1901 he promulgated a new and democratic constitution,
and almost immediately quarrelled with the Radicals whom
the country elected to work it. Very soon he swept it out of
existence and appointed a military dictatorship under General
Tsintsar-Markovitch. The task of the Government wsis not to
be performed. The finances of the country were in ruins,
largely through the rogueries of Milan. The Army and Govern-
ment officials were irregularly paid. Graft tainted every service.
Nobody’s liberty was safe. And both interior and foreign policy,
owing to the long period of Austrian tutelage and Alexander’s
inability to profit by its termination, presented a completely
bewildering spectacle to the people.

In April 1903 rioters were shot down in the streets of
Belgrade. In May there was a General Election, with all
returns grossly falsified by the Government. On the night of

SERBIA

575

June the eleventh General Tsintsar-Markovitch went to King
Alexander and told him that he could no longer face the task
of ruling the country when the people were so solidly against
him. This news distressed and angered the King, and he covered
him with bitter abuse. But later he became calmer and admitted
the reasonableness of the resignation, and only asked that his
Prime Minister should carry on in office till a successor could
be found. About ten o’clock the interview ended, and the
King and Queen committed a last imprudence. Every evening
a military band played in the gardens in front of the palace,
while the crowds walked to and fro. The King and Queen went
out on a balcony and sat there surrounded by Draga’s sisters,
including the one who was supposed to have assisted her in a
plot to foist a false heir on the throne, and her two insanely
ambitious brothers. Through the gathering darkness the people
looked at the royal party with hatred that was strangling in its
intensity, that had need to come to a climax. Meanwhile Tsintsar-
Markovitch had gone to his home and sat up talking to his wife
over a glass of wine. There were two reasons why they did not
go to bed. Their eldest daughter, a girl of twenty-one, was
married to a young officer named Milkovitch, who was that
night on guard at the palace, and she was expected to give
birth to her first child at any moment at her own home, which
was in a neighbouring house. Also both Tsintsar-Markovitch
and his wife felt sorrow over his resignation, and concern lest it
should lead to royal disfavour.

In the cafes and garden-restaurants the usual summer
crowds were sitting listening to the gipsy bands and watching
the fireflies among the trees. There stands by Kalemegdan
Park a hotel called the “ Serbian Crown ", which is dis-
tinguished by a certain romantic, haunted grace, as if the shutters
had been flung back by ghosts keeping trysts made in a past
and more passionate age. It has a long verandah which on
warm nights is thrown open to the air, and there, on this night
of June the eleventh, which was the anniversary of the murder
of Prince Michael Obrenovitch thirty-five years before, sat a
party of officers who attracted a great deal of attention. One
of them was “ Apis ", Dragutin Dimitriyevitch, who ten years
later was to give out guns and bombs to the lads from Sarajevo
who wanted to kill Franz Ferdinand. They were drinking an
enormous amount of plum brandy, and they called repeatedly

576 BLACK LAMB AND GREY FALCON

for the tune which was played in honour of the Queen when
she apjteared in public, “ Queen Draga’s Kolo Once at
least they got up and danced the kolo, the Serbian national
dance, forming a circle with their arms on each other’s shoulders
and their feet shuffling in an intricate rhythm. It was not
extraordinary that they should dance the kolo. To this day
soldiers will do that at any minute, outside their barracks or
when they have to wait in a public place, say at a railway
station. But it was extraordinary that these officers should
dance Queen Draga’s kolo, considering her unpopularity. It
was explained for many of the onlookers by their drunkenness.
A number of them were visibly drunk by eleven o’clock.

Shortly after that hour they left and walked towards the
palace. They were joined by certain other parties of officers
who had been spending their evening at various caffis and the
Officers’ Club. Some of them also were flushed and riotous, but
some were quite sober and well able to play their appointed parts
in the conspiracy. One of these was Draga’s brother-in-law.
Colonel Mashin. His motive in leading these soldiers against
the palace may be taken as largely base. He had received large
gifts of money from King Milan, who had often sent him on
interesting missions ; with exquisite inappropriateness he had
been one of Serbia’s representatives at The Hague International
Peace Conference of 1 899. All these benefits had stopped at the
marriage of Alexander and Draga, when Milan left the country
to die. This must have inflamed to fever-point his resentment
against Draga for her failure to appreciate his brother’s delirium
tremens. Of Mashin nothing noble has ever been disclosed. But
other leaders of the conspiracy were of a quite different sort.
One lived to be a great man, of proven courage and wisdom,
incorruptible in a time of temptation, never forgetful of his
peasant origin and always loyal to the peasants. His family
speak of him as selfless, austere to himself and tender with all
others. Their followers also were of different qualities. Some
were going to the palace in the expectation of murder and loot.
Others went to demand the abdication of Alexander and to
promise him and his wife a safe conduct over the frontiers on
condition he did not name either of the Lunyevitza brothers
as his successor. And of the eighty-six conspirators twenty-six
had come up that day from scattered garrisons in answer to
telegrams from Mashin telling them to get leave on any pretext

SERBIA

577

and hurry to Belgrade, and were still not quite sure what was
going to happen.

From the restaurant some went to the barracks of certain
regiments to keep them from leaving for the defence of the
palace when the alarm was given. Others went to the palace
and gave the previously arranged signal which was to bring
them the King’s equerry to open the outer door and lead
them to the royal bedroom. But he had already repented of
his consent to the conspiracy and had reacted to repentance
in the manner of a Dostoevsky character. He had not betrayed
his comrades to the King, he had simply sat in a chair in the
entrance-hall and drunk himself into a state of unconsciousness,
so that he would be unable to hear them when they came.
Eventually they had to explode the locked door with a dynamite
cartridge. This gave the alarm inside the palace and out. The
King’s aide-de-camp ran to the telephone but found the wires
cut. Then the electric lights went out, either because the system
had been damaged by the explosion or, some say, because the
aide-de-camp turned off the central switch. Outside some
gendarmes ran out of the neighbouring police station, saw a
mob in the street, and began to fire. But what they thought
was a mob was the Sixth Regiment, who had been brought out
of barracks by one of the conspirators, and the soldiers answered
fire. For a quarter of an hour there was a battle, but then the
lie which had brought the Sixth Regiment to the palace spread
to the police. They were told that King Alexander was turning
Queen Draga out of the palace and that they had been sent for
to keep peace in the town while she and her family were sent
off to the frontier ; and at once they ceased action. The same
lie had disarmed the palace guard. All stood silent, bemused,
cataleptic, because of their hatred of this woman.

The King’s equerry was shocked out of his drunken sleep
and staggered to the door. The conspirators cried out that he
had betrayed them and “ Apis ” shot him dead. There is no
record that this inveterate plotter of attentats, who dreamed all
his life long of murdering crowned heads, ever killed anyone
with his own hands except this dazed and unimportant man.
Terrified, with the din of the street-fighting in their ears, they
sent over to the house of a doctor near by and asked for candles.
Since the doctor was told the story of Draga's expulsion, he
gladly gave them. With these feeble lights the conspirators

578 BLACK LAMB AND GREY FALCON

hurried into the palace, not knowing how long they had left
for their work, and blundered about amongst the shifting
shadows and the litter of furniture. The palace was a line
example of the school of interior decoration to which the
dynasties of Europe seem irresistibly drawn, and they had to
And their way among objects including many bead portiires, a
huge black bear that someone had shot during the Bulgarian
War, marble fountains removed from old Turkish palaces, an
immense number of occasional tables covered with bric-k-brac,
tom-toms and Turkish hookahs. They stumbled about, knock-
ing things over, and tried to find their way to the royal bedroom.
Sometimes enemies detached themselves from the shadows,
loyal members of the palace guard, who were instantly killed.
One was Milkovitch, husband of Tsintsar-Markovitch’s eldest
daughter, who was that night in childbirth.

Concerning these loyalists a divergence of opinion soon
appeared. Some were merely for overpowering the King and
Queen, others were for outright murder and did it. There must
have been a certain amount of mutual distrust among the con-
spirators themselves by the time they struggled through the
darkness to the royal bedroom and found that the King and
Queen had gone. There was no question but that they had just
left, for the bed was still warn», and a French novel had been
thrown down on the bed-table, open and face-down. Now the
conspirators had reason to feel real fear. If the King had got
away and roused those soldiers who were still faithful, they
would all lose their lives. They ordered the aide-de-camp,
whom they had wounded in the shooting downstairs, to be
brought upstairs and they questioned him. Though he was
weak and in pain, he lied glibly and sensibly to gain time.
First he persuaded them to go down and search the cellars,
which they did for an hour. When they were satisfied that there
was nobody there they ran upstairs and ransacked the rooms
again, some holding candles while the others drew their swords
and poked them under sofas and pierced curtains with them,
and beat them on the walls to detect secret doors. Their
situation was becoming more and more desperate.

Meanwhile two officers had been sent with a company of
soldiers to the house of Tsintsar-Markovitch. When they
knocked at the door the General and his wife thought a messenger
had come from their daughter's house. But owing to the con-

SERBIA

579

versation that they had been having about the results of his
resignation, he was not surprised and he received them court-
eously and tranquilly. The senior officer told him that they had
been sent to place him under arrest in his own house until it
was time for him to go to the palace to hand over the seals of
office. The General still showed no surprise and treated them
as soldiers doing their duty, bidding them sit down while he
gave them cigarettes. They smoked for a while. The senior
officer showed signs of agitation which puzzled his junior, who
did not know that they had been sent to kill the General. After
a time the General rose and said, “ I will go and order some
coffee,” and as soon as he turned his back on his guests the
senior officer lifted his revolver and shot him three times. The
assassin stood in great distress, crying out that he had been ordered
to do this thing, while the junior officer knelt down and took
the dying man in his arms. " Your Majesty, Your Majesty,”
Tsintsar-Markovitch said with his last breath, ” I have been
faithful to you. 1 did not deserve that you should do this thing
to me." And in this error he died.

At the palace. King Alexander and Queen Drags were
hiding in a little room that opened off their bedroom, scarcely
more than a wardrobe, where her dresses were hung and her
maid did her sewing and ironing. There had been a secret
passage specially built by King Milan to meet just such an
occasion as this, but Alexander had scornfully had it bricked
up. The door to this wardrobe room was covered by the
same wallpaper as the bedroom walls, and it completely de-
ceived the conspirators, perhaps because they searched by
candlelight. The King and Queen kept silent till they heard
their enemies question their aide-de-camp and then go stumbling
down to the cellars. Then the King went to the window and
cried to the soldiers whom he saw dimly standing about in the
gardens about the palace. But they were all some way off, and
he was leaning from a dark window, and they had been told
that the officers of the palace guard were protecting their King
against a conspiracy started by Draga and her family. They
stood silent and immovable. The hatred of Draga had become
a wandering spell, an enchantment that played about the city,
sealing the mouths and paralysing the bodies of all its in-
habitants.

The royal pair seem to have given up the attempt to save

sSo BLACK LAMB AND GREY FALCON

themselves for a time and to have tried to clothe themselves
decently. The King was wearing trousers and a red silk shirt,
and Draga had found lying about a pair of white silk stays,
a petticoat and yellow stockings. She did not dare to open a
cupboard to get out a dress, for fear of making a noise, -and
they were in darkness. Their torture lasted for about two
hours. Then the Queen, who was standing at the window, saw
an officer come into the gardens just below, and recognised him
by his walk as the Commander of the Royal Guard. She leaned
out and cried to him, “ Come and save your King ! He is in
danger ! " The Commander halted, looked up, and made sure
that it was she. He raised his revolver and fired at her : or
rather at the Austrian Empire, at our evil earth, at our polluted
species, at sin. A wide shot, for she was in fact none of these
things. It was no wonder he missed her.

This Commander went round to the entrance-hall and found
the conspirators, with their drawn swords in their hands,
wrangling with the dying aide-de-camp, who was on the point
of persuading them to search another building near by. He
told them that he had seen the Queen at a window near the
royal bedroom. They ran back to it at once, but still could
not find the wardrobe room. An axe was fetched from a wood-
shed in the palace courtyard, and one of the officers struck the
walls till he came on the door. It was locked, and there is no
evidence whether it was broken open or whether the King and
Queen unbolted it under promise of safety. All that is known is
that at the last they stood in their bedroom, the flabby spectacled
young man and the stout and bloated middle-aged woman,
fantastically dressed, and faced a group of officers whose shaking
hands held guttering candles and drawn swords and revolvers.

Mashin was there, but so was a leader of the highest char-
acter. This man asked the King if he would abdicate, and was
answered with the bitterest words a son ever spoke. “ No ; I
am not King Milan, I am not to be overawed by a handful of
officers.” Then all the revolvers in the room fired at once, and
Alexander fell into Draga’s arms. He cried, " Mito I Mito 1
how could you do this thing to me ? ” Mito was the familiar
name of Tsintsar-Markovitch. Alexander died in the belief that
he had been assassinated by order of the man who had died an
hour before in the belief that he had been assassinated by order
of Alexander. Then the revolvers fired again, and Draga

SERBIA

581

dropped to the floor. A madness came on most of the men
in the room. They stripped the bodies and hacked them with
their swords, gashing the faces, opening their bellies. Some
of them who did not run amok shouted to them that they must
all go away now that the deed was done, that partisans of the
King and Queen might come in and arrest them. This, how>
ever, did not do anything to restore decency to the scene. For
with a dreadful sanity the men who had been stripping and
slashing tumbled the naked corpses out of the window into the
gardens below. This was sound common sense and guaranteed
their own safety, for it showed that both King and Queen were
dead and there was now no one to protect or be protected by,
since there were no Obrenovitches left to succeed to the throne.
But it added another indecency to the scene. Alexander’s arms
had always been much more developed than the rest of his body ;
and as there was a spark of life in him he clung to the balcony
with one hand as he went over, and an officer had to sever his
Angers with a sword before he would let go. When he had been
cast down on the lawn his other hand closed on some blades
of grass.

The morning broke ; and although it was June some rain
fell about four o’clock. That brought the Russian Minister
out of his Legation, which looked across a chestnut avenue at
the palace. He had been watching the tragedy all night through
the slits in his shutters. Though he could certainly have taken
steps to rescue the King and Queen, he had intervened neither
then nor when he had been informed of the conspiracy, which
had happened two or three days earlier. For a great number of
people had known of it beforehand. Mr. Miyatovitch, who was
then Serbian Minister in London, received a full description
of it at a spiritualist seance held by Mr. W. T. Stead three
months before. The medium, Mrs. Burchell, had visualised the
scene with singular fldelity. Such at least was the opinion of
everybody present who came from Finsbury Park, though a
gentleman from Hounslow heard nothing. Other persons,
however, received intimations later and from more materialistic
sources. The Austrian Government knew of it, and certain
movements of troops on its frontiers could be explained only
by that foreknowledge. But it would not issue a warning to
Alexander, its enemy. And the Russian Legation would not
issue a warning to its highly unsatisfactory friend, who was

VOL. I

58s BLACK LAMB AND GREY FALCON

so unpopular, so awkward, and, above all, so unlucky. But
there is a point at which a gentleman must draw the line.
Entering the garden, the Russian Minister went up to the
officers who were standing about and pointed to the corpses.
“ For God’s sake," he said, “ carry them into the palace. Do
not leave them here in the rain exposed to the gaze of the
public.” This sentence may well be preserved as a symbol
of the kind and degree in which the great powers have acted as
a civilising influence in the Balkans.

Belgrade VII

Thereafter the city blossomed like the rose. Serbia was
young again, it was refreshed, it tossed its head and threw off
its sleep and faced the morning in its strength, because Draga
was dead, because the bad woman had been killed. The actual
ills that Alexander Obrenovitch had committed, or at any rate
consented to, the imprisonments and floggings, the corruption
and fraud, were quickly forgotten. For long the people have
spoken as if he had been murdered because he was Draga’s
husband, and as if his murder were secondary to hers, and as
if the murders were purgations of a plague, which was nothing
but Draga.

This is a mystery. For Draga was insignificant. She is
one of the most negative people who appear in history. At no
point in her career does she seem to have said or done anything
that could be remembered five minutes later. She represents
prose in its defective sense, in its limitation to factual statement,
in its lack of evocation and illumination. Her enemies found
it difficult to make a case against her, because she provided
them with no material from which any deduction could be
made ; and for the same reason her friends could build up no
defence. When she went into a room she did nothing that was
noble and nothing that was base, she stood up if standing was
good, and she sat down if sitting was better. No man except
Alexander seems to have loved her, and although a few women
felt a protective kindness towards her, they do not talk of her
as in any way interesting.

■ Such a woman could not have conunitted a great crime, and
indeed she never was accused of any. To plan the substitution

SERBIA

583

of an heir to the throne would have been disgraceful, had she
ever truly done so ; but that can be left on one side, for Serbia’s
hatred of Draga was mature before she ever became Queen.
It was ostensibly based on the immorality of her life as a young
widow in Belgrade; and let us visualise exactly what that
meant if it were real. A beautiful and dull young woman lived
in a small room somewhere in Belgrade ; on the walls there
would be hung many family photographs and a poor bright
rug or two, and on the wooded floor there would be one or two
others of these poor rugs. There would come to her sometimes
men who would perhaps be comely and young like herself, for
she was not so poor as to need to take lovers against her inclina-
tion. There would follow some conversation, agonising in its
banality had one had to listen to it, but not criminal, not threaten-
ing to anyone’s peace or life. It would not be unnatural if the
couple soon abandoned the use of words, and turned to embraces,
which would as like as not be purely animal in inspiration.
Then, if the worst of what the Queen’s enemies said was true,
they went into another room, in which there was a bed, and lay
down on it. Once they were there nature limited them to the
performance of a certain number of movements which except
to the neurotic are not abhorrent, which some people find
agreeable and others disagreeable, which by common consent
have to be judged ethically solely by their results, since they
themselves carry hardly any but a momentary and sensational
significance.

Now, this is admittedly not what one would hope to find
in the past of a royal personage. A queen should know only
the love that lasts, as a king should know only the courage that
never fails. But it must be reiterated that Draga was hated
before there was any probability that she should become queen :
and that makes the power of the scene over the popular imagina-
tion remarkable. It might have led to the birth of an illegitimate
child, but it did not. It might have led to the transmission of
venereal disease, but it did not. Still, the potentiality shadows it.
But even so it is extraordinary that the ^bs should have been
distraught and frenzied by a scene that was darkened by only
the shadow of horror when they were so familiar with scenes
that were black with its substance. They were used to murder,
to the bullet that sped from the forest branches, to the rope
that strangled the captive who the next day would be pro-

584 BLACK LAMB AND GREY FALCON

nounced a suicide. They were used to the fraudulent trial,
the lying witnesses, the bribed judge, the undeserved imprison-
ment and the thieving fine. Yet it was Draga who sent their
blood rushing to blind their eyes, who made them draw their
swords in a completely supererogatory murder. For there was
no reason whatsoever to kill Draga. Alexander it would
perhaps have been impossible to leave alive, for his obstinacy
and his sense of grandiose destiny would have made him cling
to power if it meant wrecking his country’s peace. But Draga
could safely have been put on a train and sent off to spend the
rest of her days between Passy and Nice. There was no reason
at all why the conspirators should have spent that night of panic
in the palace staggering about among the occasional tables and
the bead portiires, accumulating damnable guilt.

But it would be fatuous to deny the dynamic effect of the
deed. There was at first the movement towards demoralisation
that would have been expected. The conspirators murdered
not only the King and Queen and the Prime Minister, but also
the Minister of War, and Draga’s two brothers. These two
young men were brought to the barracks of the regiment and
confronted by the Commander of the Royal Guard, the same
who had shot at Draga from her garden. " Their Majesties
are now dead,” he said to them with ferocious irony. " The
moment has come for your Royal Highnesses to command.
Do not hesitate. We are your faithful subjects. Pray give
your orders. But if I may presume to advise you, you will not
ask for more than a glass of water and a cigarette.” They were
then taken out into a courtyard and shot by a firing-party com-
manded by Lieutenant Tankositch, the friend of “ Apis ",
who eleven years later was to aid him in giving arms to Princip
and his friends for the Sarajevo attentat. After such a blood
bath there was bound to be disorder and there was some looting
of the palace and the houses of the murdered Ministers. But
in a day the Army was brought to heel, and the business of
government was competently carried on. A provisional govern-
ment was formed, and after a peculiar religious service, of a
kind not prescribed in any missal, attended by the Ministers
and conspirators, a deputation set off to Geneva to offer the
throne to Peter Karageorgevitch.

It is incontestable that Peter Karageorgevitch had known
nothing about the murders beforehand. His worst enemies

SERBIA

58s

never seriously alleged that he had been consulted, and several
of the conspirators admitted that they never dared tell him. He
was a man of fifty-seven, with an upright character and a
complete incapacity for pliancy, and they were well aware that
had he known of their intentions he would have stiffly denounced
them to the proper authorities. For a Royal Pretender he had
had a curious career. He was the grandson of the great Kara-
george and the son of the Alexander Karageorgevitch who had
ruled without zest from 1842 to i8j8. Because of his father’s
democratic principles he had been brought up as much like a
peasant child as possible, and had gone out from the palace to
the national school every morning. At the time of his father’s
abdication he was sent to a boarding-school in Geneva, which
was singularly successful in marking him for life. To the end
of his days there was grafted on the essential Serb in him an
industrious, conscientious, Puritan Swiss. He spent his holidays
on his father’s estate in Transylvanian Hungary and learned
the elements of farming ; but he elected to become a soldier,
and at seventeen went to France and passed through the
Military Academies of Saint Cyr and Metz. He fought in the
Franco-Prussian War and was wounded and decorated, and
laid the foundations of the rheumatism that was to cripple him
in later life by swimming the Loire in midwinter to escape
capture. We have an odd vignette of him bursting into a house
in a French town one quiet evening during the campaign,
explaining that he had heard from the streets the tones of a
harmonium and begging that he might be allowed to play on
it. He then spent a happy hour wheezing out Serbian national
airs.

He remained inveterately serious and simple. It is doubtful
whether he ever learned that a harmonium is not chic. But
the rest of his family established itself in Paris and could have
taught him that the right thing was a grand piano covered
with a Japanese embroidery. His younger brother, Arsenius,
became a dashing Russian officer, and later a well-known
boulevardier ; of his young cousins, Alexis and Bozhidar, much
can be read in Marie BashkirtsefF’s Journal. Indeed, one of the
most interesting exhibits in Prince Paul’s Museum at Belgrade,
though it has some fine Corots and Degas and Van Goghs
and Matisses, is a charming picture by Marie of the bearded
young Bozhidar, leaning from a balcony threaded with orange

586 BLACK LAMB AND GRElf>'FALCON

nasturtiums, looking down on a Paris silvery with' autunnn.
This boy grew to be a water-colourist of some merit and wrote
several Loti-like books about travel in the East which consisted
almost entirely of colour-adjectives,; he was a close friend of
Sarah Bernhardt, and was in much demand for masquerades
because of his capacity for Arielesque gaiety. Alexis and he
both spent money like water on highly amusing and refined
objects. They were conspicuously not what would be expected
of the gp'andchildren of a Serb pig-breeder and rebel chief.
But all the genes characteristic of Karageorge seemed to have
been transmitted in almost uncomfortable purity to Peter.

He spent some time in France after he left the Army, and
studied the elements of law and social science. It was at this
time that he translated John Stuart Mill’s Essay on Liberty
into Serbian. In 1875 he went to Bosnia and fought in the
revolt against Turkey, and was unremittingly in command of a
company of comitadji throughout the whole three years of the
campaign. After the settlement he went to Serbia, not to advocate
his claim to the throne but to sec his native country again. He
was soon expelled by the police. Five years later he went to
Montenegro to help Prince Nicholas reorganise his army, and
married one of his daughters. In 1889 his wife died of con-
sumption, leaving him with three children, two boys and a girl.
By this time he had taken an intense dislike to his father-in-law,
whom he rightly considered dishonest and dishonourable, so he
moved with his family to Geneva.

There he lived in great poverty. There was barely enough
money to feed the family, and some people in Switzerland
believe that Peter added to his income by some such work as the
copying of legal documents. He also took his full share in his
family responsibilities. He had taken furnished rooms, and an
elderly cousin acted as nurse to the children, but there were
three of them, and presently four ; for his brother Arsenius
had married in Russia a member of the plebeian but wealthy
family of Demidoff, and they had separated, leaving a little
boy (now Prince Paul) without a home. Peter brought them
up with a tender, anxious, austere care. He gave them their
first lessons, and he watched ovct their manners and morals
with an unrelenting eye. A Serb and a Swiss, he thought
that one must be a soldier, and that one must be good. The
training that this faith brought on the four children is not

SERBIA

587

altogether agreeable to cpntonplate. They were all over-
worked. They had to attend the ordinary Swiss elementary
school during the day, which was supposed to be a whole-time
education, and in the evening they had to learn the Serbian
language and history and literature from a Serbian governess
and their father. They were also subjected to ferocious dis-
cipline. In 1 896 their mother’s sister Helen married the Crown
Prince of Italy, and invited the children, of whom she was very
fond, to the wedding at Rome. The little daughter was not
allowed to go because her marks at school had been bad.

But he was kind and loving. To understand his severity
towards his children it must be remembered that he intensely
disapproved of his own family. He thought Arsenius might
probably be saved in so far as he was a good soldier, but his
Swiss side found much to disapprove of in his brother con-
sidered as a dashing Russian officer, and the divorced husband
of Aurora Demidoff. As for Bozhidar and Alexis, he thought
they were degeneration itself. Alexis had married a very rich
American lady, and to please her had tried to get Peter to stand
back and let him assume the role of Pretender, pointing out
that he at least had the money to finance his claim. This had
struck Peter as a most unholy proposal, and he coldly con-
tinued to instruct his children in the legend of Kossovo and
deprive them of their meals if they were not in time for them,
trusting that by such means he w'ould prevent them from re-
sembling their relatives. But it could not escape his notice that
his elder son, George, showed undoubted signs of the unstable
charm which he disliked in Alexis and Bozhidar, and, what
was perhaps more serious, the moody violence that had darkened
the genius of Karageorge.

It was perhaps for this reason that in 1 898 Peter accepted
an offer made by the Tsar to receive all three of his children
in St. Petersburg, give them the freedom of the palaces, and
educate them at the best Russian schools. It is certain that
his Liberal tendencies would have been better pleased if the
children had been educated in Switzerland or France ; but he
could no longer face the responsibility of bringing them up on
scanty food, in uncomfortable lodgings, and without advice,
when there was this handsome alternative. But though this
improved his family’s lot it initiated a most uncomfortable
routine for him. The little Paul could not at first be taken to

SS8 BLACK LAMB AND GREY FALCON

Russia for reasons connected with his parents’ troubles, and
he remained in Geneva under the care of Prince Peter and his
cousin till later. But Prince Peter had to take care th^it his
children remained good Serbs and were not Russified, so he
visited them in Russia in the holidays, travelling as cheaply as
possible. These journeys were not wasted. His second son,
Alexander, remained curiously impervious to Romanoff luxury,
practised his father’s frugality and chastity, and cultivated
Serb circles in St. Petersburg. The Roman virtue of this man
was real, and had its emanations.

The news of the Belgrade murders must have been un-
speakably disgusting to Peter Karageorgevitch. He had never
supported his claim to the Serbian throne by the most faintly
dubious action. He had announced that he believed himself to
be the rightful ruler of Serbia and that he was willing to take
up the sceptre whenever the Serbian people demanded it ; and
there he had left it. Now he was faced with what is the nastiest
thing in the world from an Army officer’s point of view : an
Army conspiracy. He was faced with what is the next nastiest
thing from a soldier’s point of view, the slaughter of unarmed
civilians. Also one victim had been a woman, and there had
been a great deal of drunkenness. It must have been the
bitterest moment in his life when he went to his caf6 to read
the morning newspapers and found them black with this blot
on his country, which — as it must have struck him after the
first second’s shock — was also a blot on his own name. When
the Skupshtina elected him King he was faced with one of the
most unpleasant dilemmas that has ever faced a decent man.
He knew that if he accepted the throne the whole world would
suspect him of complicity in the murders, he would be ostracised
by all other reigning sovereigns, and he would be in the deadliest
personal danger, since mutiny is no exception to the rule that
the appetite grows by what it feeds on. But he knew that Serbia
needed a good king and that there was nobody else likely to
rule well except himself. He knew too that there were many
people in Serbia who trusted him to save them from misgovern-
ment. It is also possible that the Tsar had given his children
their education on the understanding that he would go to
Belgrade when the opportunity served and protect the country
from the Austrian devourer of the Obrenovitches.

When the twenty-four delegates from the Skupshtina arrived

SERBIA

S«9

in Geneva and offered Peter Karageorgevitch the Serbian
crown, he stiffly accepted. Without temporising, without wait-
ing till European excitement had subsided, he took the train
to Belgrade and got there thirteen days after the assassination.
By that time all powers except Austria and Russia had with-
drawn their diplomatic representatives as a mark of scorn.
Peter greeted his people with a gravity which made it plain that
it was for him to approve them rather than for them to approve
him. His first legislative act was to remove the censorship on
the foreign press. No newspapers from abroad were to be
seized or blacked. " Serbia," said Peter, without explaining
himself further, " shall henceforth know what other countries
think of it."

His immediate problem was how to deal with the regicides.
He never dealt with them in the complete and clear-cut way
suggested by the over-zealous apologists of the Karageorge-
vitches. It is said in one history that he removed them all
within three years. This is not true. Peter recognised that
there were differences in guilt among the conspirators, and that
some were high-minded men who had conceived the crime out
of public spirit and had never intended it to be so bloody. Even
under strong foreign pressure he refused to expel these men
from office. One was the famous General Mishitch, who
showed himself a great soldier in the Balkan wars and still
greater in the World War. But others he recognised as base
and sooner or later excluded from official favour ; Mashin was
one. And Peter would not persecute those who denounced the
crime. When he was reviewing a regiment four months after
his arrival a lieutenant left the ranks and shouted in his face that
the blood of Alexander was still crying out for vengeance ; the
young man was removed from the Army but was not otherwise
punished. Soon the baser regicides banded together to protect
themselves, and in 1907 they assassinated the head of the anti-
regicide group. Peter used that assassination, in conjunction
with an Austrian attempt to eject him and give the Serbian
throne to an Anglo-German, to sober public opinion. He told
his people that if they insisted on behaving like wild beasts
they must expect to be caged and put in charge of a keeper.
But he himself was well aware that though he had thereby
cleansed public opinion he had not succeeded in rounding up
all the conspirators of dangerous character. . Chief among these

590 BLACK LAMB AND GREY FALCON

was Dragutin Dimitriyevitch, who was protected by the extra-
ordinary personal fascination which made him a popular figure
in the Army.

But the question of the regicides mattered far less than can
be supposed. Incredible as it may seem, it was dwarfed by the
astonishing achievements of which the people, refreshed by their
sacrifice of Draga, found themselves easily and happily capable.
Peter began a programme of reforms in the simplest, most
Genevese spirit. When his major-domo came to him on the
day of his arrival to enquire what sort of menus he preferred,
he exclaimed, " Menus ! menus 1 I have no time for menus 1
Never speak of such things to me again.’’ He can indeed have
had very little time, for he started to reform Serbia on foot and
by hand. He would walk without military escort to a hospital,
and if he found all the doctors out, as was not unlikely to happen
in those Arcadian days, he wrote in the visitors’ book, “ King
Peter has been here ”. He would visit a school, and if he
found the children playing and the teachers gloomily discussing
their grievances, he wrote on the blackboard, " King Peter has
been here ”. He went on, however, to deal with the grievance
which most afflicted doctors and teachers, and indeed many civil'
servants and soldiers in Serbia, and explained a great deal of
disordered conduct ; he saw that they were paid regularly.
Swiss honesty, which in the place of its origin sometimes seems
too much of a good thing, affected the Serbians, after thirty-five
years of Milan and Alexander, as picturesque and exotic. It
was to them what their national costume is to us. They stood
gaping, while by continuous probity Peter brought his own
state to financial order and even won the respect of international
financiers. Alexander had been unable to raise a loan in Vienna
even by pledging the entire railway system of Serbia, but Peter
was che^ully lent nine times the sum his predecessor had vainly
importuned.

The Serbs rose to their dawn. They followed him along the
new path that Serbia had not trodden for five hundred years,
to the world where success, and golden, luxuriant success at
that, was won not only by the sword but by the plough, the
loom, the pen, the brush, the balance. For the first time since
the Turkish Conquest the lost civilisation of Byzantium showed
signs of revival, and at last it seemed as if the monotonous
reciprocal process of tyranny and resistance were to be displaced

SERBIA

591

by a Inily polymorphous life. The Serbians spread their wings,
they soared up to the sun. When Austria saw them it was
enraged. It contrived a snare to get Serbia back under its
tutelage. When King Peter reorganised his army, under the
commandership of his brother, Arsenius Karageorgevitch, he
proposed to buy some big guns from France ; he also arranged
a customs agreement of a most brotherly sort with Bulgaria.
Vienna rapped him sharply over the knuckles. The agreement
with Bulgaria must be cancelled, and the guns must be ordered
from Austria. King Peter refused ; so did his Prime Minister,
Nicholas Pashitch, the Lloyd George of Serbia, a crafty idealist ;
so did the intoxicated Serbians. “ The Obrenovitches are gone,
the Karageorgevitches are here, we are no longer slaves,”
they said. ‘

Austria then declared economic warfare on the Serbians.
It looked as if it must conquer, and that easily. Serbia
had only one industry, pig-breeding, and there was nothing
simpler than raising the tariff against their livestock to prohibi-
tive heights. That killed at one blow nine-tenths of their trade.
However, the Serbians tightened their belts, and very soon
found new markets in France, Egypt and even England, while
the price of meat mounted to preposterous heights in Austria.
The “ pig war ’’ lingered on for five years from 1905 to 1910.
As its failure became manifest, Austria made it clear she had
not accepted defeat. In 1908 the abominable Aehrenthal chose
to annex Bosnia and Herzegovina ; which, once annexed, were
a threat to every state between Austria and the Black Sea. It
meant that the Hapsburgs, having failed to subdue Serbia by
economic warfare, meant some day to settle the score by the
use of arms. Again the Serbians spread their wings and soared
up to the sun. “ If there is Austria,” they said, " there is also
Russia. We have no need to cringe before any state ; we are
a strong people whose strength will buy us allies.” And this
indeed was true, now that they had a king who could not be
bought and would not let his Ministers sell themselves.

This moment must have found King Peter at his happiest
and his most sorrowful. The contrast between the disorganised
and dishonoured Serbia which he had taken over from the
Obrenovitches and the proud and virile state which was now
making its own terms with the great power, was, indeed, the
sign of one of the most dramatic personal achievements in

592 BLACK LAMB AND GREY FALCON

modem history. But it is quite possible that he was not
altogether pleased by the company his triumph had brought on
him. He had had to accept Russian upbringing for his children
in his days of exile ; now he had to accept Russian protection
for his subjects. But the democratic Serb, the Liberal Swiss,
the translator of John Stuart Mill’s Essay on Liberty, could
not but disapprove of Russian absolutism ; his frugality must
have been repelled by the luxury of the Romanoffs ; and he
knew that the South Slavs had every reason to fear the Russian
movement known as Pan-Slavism. That had become evident
in the seventies, when the Turks had tried to kill Greek and
Serb influence in Macedonia by founding the Bulgarian Ex-
archate, which was to make the government of the Macedonian
churches independent of the Greek Patriarchate. This Ex-
archate was inevitably anti-Serb, as Serbs wanted self-govern-
ment for their own churches ; and Russia lent her support to the
Exarchate, because it feared the Austro-Hungarian Empire
and its dominance of Serbia and therefore wished to have no
Serbs in Macedonia. Hence it put up the money for Bul-
garian churches, schools and newspapers, which had no other
object than to turn Serbs into Bulgarians. In fact Russia had,
in the name of Pan-Slavism, destroyed the unity between the
Serbs and the Bulgarians which was necessary if the South
Slavs were ever to maintain themselves against the Turks and
the Austrians. Later Russia sometimes retrieved her position,
but she often backslid. This was no stable ally of the sort that
King Peter, King Rock, would have chosen.

He had another and more personal sorrow. His elder son,
the Crown Prince George, took a prominent part in politics
and became the leader and idol of the violent pro-war party.
Of his charm and courage and ability there was no doubt ; and
he was even sound in judgment. When the rest of Europe still
held blind faith in the efficiency of the Austrian Army he
predicted its collapse under the first prolonged strain. But the
fantastic strain in him which had grieved his father in the old
days at Geneva was flowering into a monstrosity not to be
ignored. King Peter could not deal with him in the summary
manner that would have been best ; his popularity with the
Army, and particularly among those officers who had formed
the more disreputable part of the regicidal conspirators, would
have made it dangerous to seclude him. But in 1909 he fell

SERBIA

593

into trouble. He killed his valet in an attack of rage. The
most charitable account has it that he found the man reading
his letters and kicked him downstairs with no intention of
inflicting on him any serious injury. The King then inflexibly
required that the Crown Prince should resign his claim to the
succession in favour of his brother Alexander, though he felt
obliged to let him retain his commission in the Army. It has
been said by envenomed critics of the dynasty that this was the
result of Alexander’s intrigues ; but he was then a silent boy
of twenty-one, who was still a student at the Military Academy
in St. Petersburg, and had paid only a few brief visits to Serbia
during the six years since his father’s accession. King Peter,
who was now sixty-five, cannot have been altogether certain of
the quality of the boy he now recalled from Russia to help him
against his internal and external enemies.

Now destiny took charge of his kingdom. The Austrian
provocation became more and more insolent. In January 1909
there had been a spectacular trial in Zagreb where fifty-three Slav
subjects of the Austrian Empire had been charged with con-
spiring against their country with the connivance of the Serbian
Government, and thirty-one of them had been convicted on
obviously forged or frivolous evidence. In March 1909 the
Austrian Foreign Office handed one Dr. Heinrich Friedjung, the
distinguished Pan-German historian, forged documents which
purported to prove the existence of a new conspiracy against the
Empire not only directed but financed by certain members of
the Serbian Government. King Peter and his Ministers issued
a statement roundly calling the Austrians liars, and over fifty
Austrian Slav politicians backed up that statement by filing
actions for libel against Dr. Friedjung in Vienna. The subse-
quent trial showed beyond a doubt that all his evidence was
fabricated. Smiling, the Serbians took note, and prepared
themselves for the war that must come. They believed that it
would not come at once. Russia had been greatly annoyed by
the annexation of Bosnia, and her annoyance was a fortress wall
behind the Serbians, clearly visible to the Austrians.

There was work they could do in the meantime. Macedonia
was still unredeemed, a Christian province in the hands of the
Ottoman Empire : a hell of misgovernment, that had known no
respite for five hundred years, save for a brief period of inter-
national control at the beginning of the twentieth century, which

S94 BLACK LAMB AND GREY FALCON

had been terminated by the Austro-Hungarian and German
Empires for no other reason than the Teutonic hatred of
the Slav. It was now in the deeper darkness that follows a
false dawn. The Young Turk movement had suddenly swept
away the Sultanate, and established a constitution promis-
ing liberty to all its subjects, of whatever race. Very soon it
appeared that the Young Turk was simply the son of the Old
Turk, with a Prussian military training, and there was set on
foot a ferocious scheme for denationalising the Macedonian
Christians. Serbia and Bulgaria not only abhorred this spectacle
from the bottom of their Balkan souls, but were touched by it in
their self-interest. If the Austrians were to have an empire
stretching to the Black Sea they would first go down the valley
of the Vardar through Serbia and get command of the Aegean
at Salonica, and Serbia and Bulgaria would be impeded in their
resistance to this invasion, because Macedonia, a strip of dis-
ordered country in the hands of their enemies, the Turks, would
lie between them and their allies, the Greeks. There was no
question but they must drive out the Turks ; and with that
resolution there came to the Serbs an extraordinary happiness.
There is nothing like the peculiar gratification which fills us
when we find ourselves able to satisfy the claims of reality by
enacting a fantasy that has long warmed our imagination. The
Serbians, to live in modem Serbia, must realise the poem that
was written in the monasteries of the Frushka Gora, that was
embodied in the dark body of the Tsar Lazar. They had not
to choose whether they would make a daydream into fact ;
they were under the necessity of choosing between life with tha
daydream and death without it.

There has been no fighting in our time that has had the
romantic quality of the Balkan wars that broke out in 1912,
The Serbians rode southwards radiant as lovers. The whole
West thought them barbarous swashbucklers, and fools at that,
advancing on an enemy who had never been defeated, and had
' found some magic prescription for undeserved survival. That
mattered nothing to these dedicated troops, wrapped in their
rich and tragic dream. They were determined to offer themselves
to the horrors of war in a barren land where the climate is
bearable for only four months in the year, where there were
dust-storms and malaria and men who had been turned by art
to something more savage than savagery. Those horrors accepted

SERBIA

595

them. The summer burned them, the winter buried them in
snow ; on the vile Turkish roads their commissariat often broke
down for days and they had to live on roots and berries ; the
wounded and malarial lay contorted among the untender rocks ;
they suffered atrocities and committed them. But they were not
perturbed. In their minds there lay the splendid image of Slav
Empire, potent in spite of time and defeat, like the Tsar Lazar
in his coffin. It can be conceived as filling with a special glory,
altogether Byzantine in its rigidity of forms and intense in-
candescence, the mind of the Crown Prince Alexander, for the
Karageorgevitches permitted themselves no other poetry.

In three months the poem had completed itself. By
December 1912 the Ottoman Empire, as Europe had known it
for six hundred years, had been destroyed. The Serbians and
Bulgarians and Greeks laughed in the astonished faces of the
West. All should have gone magically well, had it not been
that the quality that the West has shown in its dealings with the
Balkans was too pervasive and enduring not to tarnish even the
purest metal of achievement. It may be remembered that the
Slavs had won this same victory once before, in 1876; 'and
had been diddled out of their victory first by Russia’s incompet-
ence, which made them sign the unsatisfactory Treaty of San
Stefano, and then by the criminal idiocy of all the great powers
combined, and of England in particular, which replaced it by
the infinitely more mischievous Treaty of Berlin, designed for
the maintenance of Turkey in Europe. This had left all sorts
of unsettled issues for the Serbians and Bulgarians to quarrel
about ; and the intrigues it engendered had placed upon the
Bulgarian throne in 1887 a being of tortuous impulses and
unlovely life called Prince Ferdinand of Saxe-Coburg-Gotha.
During his reign he watered and tended corruption as if it
were a flower. The disorder of Bulgarian politics, which is
often cited as a reproach to the Balkans, was very largely an
importation of this detestable princeling. He was always a
tool of Austria, although his bias towards treachery makes
all statements about his character difficult to frame ; and after
the Karageorgevitches had freed Serbia from the Austrian yoke
he became one of Austria’s most useful instruments in its
increasingly frenetic anti-Russian and anti-Serbian policy. He
had been forced to join with Serbia in the Balkan wars by the
will of his people, and indeed his Austrian masters told him

596 BLACK LAMB AND GRET FALCON

that there was no objection against it, provided he was ready
to do a Judas-trick at the end. And this he did.

Ferdinand assured the Serbians and the Greeks that he had
shifted his allegiance from Austria to Russia, signed pacts with
them, and went to war at their side, though not as the most
satisfactory ally imaginable. With money and munitions he
was extremely stingy, but he was generous to a fault in the manu-
facture of " incidents ” which faced too simply the problem
of rousing public sympathy. A staff of his blackguards
distributed bombs among trained bandits who exploded them
in mosques, which not unnaturally inspired the infuriated
Moslems to rush out and massacre Christians. This pleased
neither the Christians who were massacred nor the Serbs and
Greeks, who found themselves regarded with suspicion by
neutral observers. Such, however, was the melodic line traced
by Ferdinand's soul. Then, when the peace came he saw to it
that discord between the Serbians and the Bulgarians should
be its first result. The Treaty of San Stefano had awarded
Bulgaria territory that gave her a position in the Balkans only
to be justified if she had been the real liberator of the Peninsula,
and the three peoples had gone into the war with a loose under-
standing that the Treaty might at last be carried into effect if
Bulgaria provided that justification. But in that she failed.
Ferdinand had mismanaged his gallant army so that they had
in fact not even done their share of the fighting ; and the
decisive battle of the campaign, Kumanovo, had been won by
the Serbians alone. It was natural that Serbia should demand
some recognition of her special services in the peace treaties,
which should take the form of a common frontier with her ally
Greece and access to the sea at Salonica. This was an absolute
necessity to her existence, as Austria had recently created out of
the wreckage of Turkish territory a puppet state of Albania,
which was to be an Austrian stronghold that should control
Serbia and Greece.

But Ferdinand impudently resisted these reasonable demands.
The Judas-trick he had been asked to perform by Austria was
the sowing of deep dissension between the Serbians and
Bulgarians at the end of the war, if need be by the betrayal of
his own subjects' good name. During the summer of 1913,
while the peace treaties were being discussed, he spread among
his troops all manner of lies about the Serbians. Then on June

SERBIA

597

twenty-eighth, St. Vitus' Day, which was the anniversary of the
defeat of the Christians on the field of Kossovo, which was to
see the assassination of the Archduke Franz Ferdinand and
Sophie Chotek, he issued certain orders which even his own
kept Government was not allowed to know. Many Bulgarian
officers dined with Serbian officers to celebrate the recovery of
Kossovo ; when they returned to their trenches they were told
that the discovery of a conspiracy made it necessary for them to
make a surprise attack on the Serbian regiments in the early
morning. This is one of the vilest episodes in Balkan history ;
and it was not committed by a Slav. It was not a vestige of
Balkan medievalism. It cannot be laid at the door of the Turk.
It was the fruit of nineteenth-century Teutonism.

But the Serbians, knifed in the back, continued within their
dream, to achieve their poem. The powerful magic of that
dream, that incantatory poem, blunted the knife. They beat
back the Bulgarians. The Greeks, the Turks, the Roumanians,
closed in on Ferdinand, who was unperturbed. He believed
his time was yet to come. He made a secret pact with the
Emperor Franz Josef towards the end of 1913, that he should
place all the resources of Bulgaria at the disposal of Austria
and Germany, provided he was given a large portion of Serbian
and Greek and Roumanian territory if he kept his throne, and a
fat pension if his subjects expelled him. He then set to work
to thrall Bulgaria to Germany by a loan, to which the assent of
Parliament was given during a most peculiar scene. Ferdinand’s
Prime Minister faced the assembly with a revolver in his hand,
but all the same the Opposition deputies did considerable
damage on the Ministerial Front Bench by using inkstands and
books as missiles. The angels must have been greatly perplexed
by the determination of European statesmen to civilise the
Balkans by sowing them with German princelings ; for in
Belgrade, the only capital in the Peninsula ruled by a Slav,
things were going better. It would be light-minded to deny
that the second Balkan War cast for a time a red shadow of
barbarism across Serbian life. That treacherous early-morning
attack on the trenches, though the guilt lay on the Bulgarian
crown and not on the people, engendered a hatred that met
atrocity with atrocity ; and the first Serbian officials who went
to settle the newly acquired territories behaved as if they were
conquerors and not liberators. But the Liberalism of King
VOL. I 2 Q

598 BLACK LAMB AND GREY FALCON

Peter was quietly attending to these natural inflammations of a
national spirit which had suffered war; it is typical of the
difficulties of his task and of the infinite incalculabilities of
Balkan history that by far his most sagacious aide in dealing
with the problem of the tyrannous and dishonest officials in
Macedonia was one of the regicides. The tiger, blood on its
claws, crossed itself ; the golden beast became a golden youth ;
Church and State, love and violence, life and death, were to be
fused again as in Byzantium.

Hardly had the transformation been made when it was
threatened ; and the threat shocked and startled. It was known
to all Europe, and to Serbia best of all, that the Central powers
were preparing for an aggressive war, but it was not generally
expected that they meant to act in 1914. What the intelligence
services of the great powers had reported in these years has never
yet been published, though this would be far more enlightening
than any amount of diplomatic correspondence. But it is said
that both France and Russia were for some reason convinced
that Germany and Austria would not make war until 1916, and
certainly that alone would explain the freedom with which
Russia announced to various interested parties in the early
months of 1914 that she herself was not ready to fight. So
Serbia was in a trance of amazement when Franz Ferdinand
and Sophie Chotek were killed at Sarajevo, and it became certain
that the enemy was going to use the murder as a pretext for
instant attack. There could have been no more hopeless
moment. The Serbian peasant army had been fighting since
1912, and every soldier had either already gone home or was
homesick. The arsenals were empty of ‘arms, the treasury was
empty of money to buy them. There was a difficult internal
situation. King Peter was now completely crippled by the
rheumatism he had contracted in swimming the Loire to escape
capture during the Franco-Prussian War, and only ten days
before he had appointed his younger son, Alexander, already
recognised as Crown Prince in place of his elder brother George,
as Regent ; and since George had acquitted himself well in
the Balkan wars his partisans were excited and angered. It
looked as if the history of resurrected Serbia was to end in the
same moment as it began.

Such was the authority of Russia that some Serbs were
incredulous Nicholas Pashitch, the Prime Minister, did not

SERBIA

599

believe that Austria’s outcry was serious, and was hdf-way to
Athens on a visit to Venezelos when he had to be recalled to
Belgrade, to deal with Count Berchtold's famous ultimatum.
This had been framed in defiance of the report of a high official
of the Austrian Foreign Office, who had been sent to Sarajevo
to investigate the crime and had come to the conclusion that it
was " out of the question " to suppose a connection between the
Serbian Government and the assassins. The ultimatum made
eleven demands. The Serbian Government was required :

(1) To admit a policy of incitement to the crime, and publish
a confession of this and a promise of future good conduct
which should be dictated from Vienna, and both published
in the official journal at Belgrade and read to the Serbian
Army by King Peter.

(2) To suppress all publications inciting to hatred of Austria-
Hungary and directed against her territorial integrity.

(3) To dissolve the Society of National Defence (a perfectly
respectable society which had no connection whatsoever
with the crimes), and to suppress all other societies engaged
in propaganda against Austria-Hungary.

(4) To eliminate from the Serbian educational system anything
which might foment such propaganda.

(5) To dismiss all officers and officials guilty of such pro-
paganda, whose names might be communicated, then or
later, by Vienna.

(6) To accept " the collaboration in Serbia ” of Austro-
Hungarian officials in suppressing this propaganda.

(7) To open a judicial enquiry concerning those implicated in
the crime, and to allow Austro-Hungarian delegates to
take part.

(8) To arrest without delay Major Tankositch and Milan
Tsiganovitch, the Serbians who had supplied the Sarajevo
assassins with arms.

(g) To supervise the Serbian frontier so that no arms and
explosives might pass, and to dismiss the customs officials
who had helped the assassins.

(10) To give explanations regarding the “ unjustifiable ”
language used by high Serbian officials after the crime.

(11) To notify Vienna without delay of the execution of all the
above measures.

6oo BLACK LAMB AND GREY FALCON

Serbia was given only forty-eight hours to accept or reject
this ultimatum.

It was not easy to accept. The fifth' and sixth demands
meant that Serbia must become a spiritual vassal of the Austrian
Empire, in conditions that were bound before long to produce
provocative incidents, with a sequel of bloodshed and annexa-
tion. Yet the Serbian Government accepted that ultimatum,
with only three reservations. It pointed out that the constitution
of the country made it impossible to comply with certain of the
Austrian demands, such as interference with the freedom of the
press, without legislative changes impossible to enact during the
time-limit ; but it was willing to submit these points to the
arbitration of the Hague Tribunal. Pashitch took the humiliat-
ing document of his country’s submission to the Austrian
Legation a few moments before six o’clock on the evening of
July the twenty-sixth ; though the Legation was a quarter of an
hour from the station the Austrian Minister and his staff were
in the train on their way to the frontier by half-past six, a sign
that the acceptance had been rejected. The three reservations
were better than he had hoped ; though it would not have
mattered if there had been none at all, for the legal adviser of
the Austrian Foreign Office had already handed in a memo-
randum as to how war could be declared on Serbia no matter
what her reply to the ultimatum. “ If Serbia announces her
acceptance of our demands m gros, without any protest, we can
still object that she did not within a prescribed time provide
proofs that she carried out those provisions which had to be
executed ‘ at once ’ or with all speed, and whose execution she
had to notify to us ' without delay ’.”

By such means Serbia was trapped, and the whole of
Europe doomed. Count Berchtold and his friend Conrad von
Hotzendorf, who were resolved upon hostilities, persuaded the
Hungarian Minister, Count Tisza, 'to withdraw his opposition,
and gained the consent of the old Emperor Franz Josef by a
totally false statement that Serbian troops had fired on the
Austrian garrison of a Danubian port ; and the final declara-
tion of war was dispatched on July twenty-eighth. The con-
sequences were clearly foreseen by all these plotters against
peace. If Austria attacked Serbia and stretched out its hand
to the Black Sea, Russia was bound to intervene ; for Russia dic|
not want, for reasons that may seem far from frivolous in view

SERBIA

6oi

of what has already been written in this volume, to have the
Austrian Empire as a neighbour bn another front, and it could
not like to see Slavs subject to Teutons. Germany must join in
on the pretext of aiding Austria, not because it had yet developed
an appetite for Russian territory, though that was to come later,
but because it could now find a pretext for attacking France,
who was Russia’s ally and was showing dangerous signs of having
recovered its strength after the defeat of 1870. Immediately
millions of people were delivered over to the powers of darkness,
and nowhere were those powers more cruel than in Serbia.

Belgrade was at once bombarded. An army of three hundred
and fifty thousand men fought a rearguard action, without big
guns to answer their enemy’s artillery, with so few arms that
some regiments had but one rifle to two men. They gave up
Belgrade, their only town, their earnest that they were Byzantium
reborn materially as well as spiritually, and pressed back, bitter
and amazed. But Belgrade did not fall. It was left to be
defended by a single division commanded by a colonel, who
blew up the iron bridge across the Danube so that it blocked the
river against Austrian traffic, and dressed the customs officials
and such townsfolk as remained in extemporised uniforms so
that Austrian spies reported a large garrison ; and by a miracle
it remained intact when the Serbian Army turned on its tracks
and, to the world’s amazement, sprang at the Austrians’ throats
and drove them out of the country in less than a month. They
even invaded Austrian territory and set foot in Bosnia and
Herzegovina and the Serb parts of Hungary, and the Frushka
Gora itself.

But the Austrian Empire had numbers. It had at this
moment little else ; it had so little virtue or wisdom or even
common sense that again and again the student must marvel
that this was the same state as eighteenth-century Austria. But
what it had it used, and it sent back its armies in September.
This time they enjoyed a certain disgraceful advantage. During
the first invasion they had laid waste the country, pillaging the
crops, burning the houses, murdering the civil population :
at least three hundred and six women are known to have been
executed, as well as many people over eighty and children
under five. So the Serbian Army had this time to retreat over a
devastated countryside which could give it no food and offered
it much discouragement, not diminished by the floods of civilian

tea BLACK LAMB AND GREY FALCON

refugees, some Serbian, some from the Slav parts of the Austro-
Hungarian Empire, all hungry and footsore and with tales to
tell of the enemy’s malign brutality. There might have been
panic had it not been for the spirit of the Karageorgevitches
and the higher command. King Peter hobbled up to some
troops that were wavering under artillery fire to which their
army had no answer, and said to them, after the manner of a
Homeric general, “ Heroes, you have taken two oaths : one to
me, your king, and one to your country. From the first I
release you, from the second no man can release you. But if
you decide to return to your homes, and if we should be
victorious, you shall not be made to suffer.”

They did not go. To lead them a peasant’s son, who was
now showing that the Serbian peasantry eould still furnish such
great leaders as Karageorge, appointed fourteen hundred young
students as non-commissioned officers. Of these boys, who
before the war had been studying at Belgrade, Vienna, Prague,
Berlin and Paris, one hundred and forty survived the war. Arms
came suddenly to this army, sent from England. These men
who were so spent that they no longer lived by their experience
but by what is known to our conunon human stock, these boys
who had no experience at all and therefore were also thrown
back on that same primitive knowledge, alike they forgot the
usual prudent opinion that d3dng is disagreeable, and valued
death and life and honour as if they were heroes who had
died a thousand years before or gods who were under no
necessity to die. They Hung themselves again on the Austrians.
By the end of December they had retaken Belgrade. They took
down the Hungarian flag that had floated above the palace and
laid it on the steps of the cathedral when King Peter went with
his generals to the Mass of thanksgiving for victory. They had
to thank the Lord for a real suspension of natural law' ; for
when the Austrians had withdrawn over the frontiers there
remained behind rather more Austrian prisoners of war than
there were Serbian soldiers.

It is not known what King Peter thought of the future.
In his old age he had become more of a Serb, and the Genevan
mark was not so strong as it had been. He was now wholly a
warrior king, a Nemanya reborn. But it is said that the Crown
Prince Alexander, the pale and pedantic graduate of St. Peters-
burg Military Academy, knew that the victory was no more than

SERBIA

603

a breathing-space, and that there must follow another assault,
which would mean defeat. This certainty must have become a
growing horror when it was manifest that the country had
received a wound deeper than any that could be inflicted by
military action. Some of the Austrian troops had come from
parts of Galicia where typhus was endemic, and they had
brought the germs with them. Where food was scarce, water
was polluted, and vast districts were littered with dead men and
animals far beyond the power of scavenging, the fever spread.
The hospital system, particularly in the recovered Turkish
provinces, was utterly unable to cope with this inundation of
disease, and indeed it killed a third of all Serbian doctors.
There came out several foreign sanitary units, of which Dr.
Elsie Inglis’ Scottish Women’s Hospital left an imperishably
glorious name. Alexander, himself sickening for an internal
malady, spent his days travelling up and down the country
organising a medical service.

In the summer of 1915 Austria approached Serbia with
proposals for a separate peace. The Skupshtina rejected them
one blazing day, at Nish, and expressed its resolution to continue
the war till all Slavs were liberated from the Austrian yoke.
This meant that Peter and Alexander and Pashitch had come
to believe that the life of their nation was not worth preserving
unless the tyrannical power that had threatened them through-
out their entire existence were disarmed and disintegrated.
They thought it better for the nation to go down into death for
a time on the chance they might live again, if France and
England and Russia destroyed the might of the Central powers.

In the heat and dust they waited. About them refugees
wandered over a famined land ; the soldiers who waited by their
guns were worn out by three years of flghting in medieval
conditions of sanitation and commissariat ; and on the near
frontiers massed enemies which their Allies, the British and the
French, would not allow them to disperse. Incredible as it
may seem, though Great Britain and France were fighting
Germany, they still accepted the legend that Bulgaria was the
most civilised and powerful of the Balkan states, though the
only evidence ever adduced for such an estimate was that it
is the most Germanised among them ; and the Allies formed
the curious notion that it would be the easiest thing in the world
to persuade the Bulgarians to fight against the Germans in

6o4 black lamb AND GREY FALCON

defence of the Serbians, who had beaten and humiliated them
only two years before. They therefore forbade the Serbians
to attack the Bulgarian armies which were massing on the
border and which could have been easily defeated, and when
Serbia asked for a quarter of a million men to repel the impend-
ing invasion, they made the astonishing reply that they were
arranging for the Bulgarians to supply these troops. This they
attempted to do by ofiFering Bulgaria territories which Roumania,
Greece and Serbia had acquired in the Balkan wars. This
naturally turned Roumania and Greece against the Allies, and
filled the hearts of the Serbians with perplexity and bitterness.

In September the invasion began. By October the Serbian
army, which now numbered a quarter of a million men, was
faced with three hundred thousand Austro-German troops,
under the great strategist Mackensen, and as many Bulgarians.
It was now necessary for the country to die. The soldiers re-
treated slowly, fighting a rearguard action, leaving the civil
population, that is to say their parents, wives and children, in
the night of an oppression that they knew to be frightful.
Monks came out of the monasteries and followed the soldiers,
carrying on bullock-carts, and on their shoulders where the
roads were too bad, the coffined bodies of the medieval Serbian
kings, the sacred Nemanyas, which must not be defiled. So
was carried King Peter, whose rheumatic limbs were wholly
paralysed by the cold of autumn ; and so too, before the retreat
was long on its way, was Prince Alexander. The internal pain
that had vexed him all year grew so fierce that he could no
longer ride his horse. Doctors took him into a cottage and he
was operated on for appendicitis. Then he was packed in
bandages wound close as a shroud, and put on a stretcher and
carried in the procession of the troops. It is like some fantastic
detail in a Byzantine fresco, improbable, nearly impossible, yet
a valid symbol of a truth, that a country which was about to
die should bear with it on its journey to death, its kings, living
and dead, all prostrate, immobile.

The retreating army made its last stand on the Field of
Kossovo, where a short time before, in a different dream of the
Creator, it had known victory: where the tragic Tsar Lazar
had proved that defeat can last five hundred years. Above
them circled enemy aeroplanes, evil’s newest instrument. After
a last rearguard action to shake off the Bulgarians, they turned

SERBIA

605

to the wall of Montenegrin and Albanian mountains that rises
between Kossovo and the Adriatic. Rather than face that icy
path into exile, many of the soldiers and the civilian refugees
turned and fled back towards Serbia and were butchered by the
Moslem Albanians, who had been the favoured subjects of the
Turks and bitterly resented the Serbian conquests in the Balkan
wars. The rest of the army obeyed the order that they must
take this desperate step in the hope that some might survive
and be reorganised on the Adriatic shore with the help of the
British and French. When they came to the foot of the moun-
tains the weeping gunners destroyed their guns with hand
grenades and burning petrol. The motor-drivers drove their
cars and lorries up to a corner where the road became a horse-
trail on the edge of the precipice, jumped out, and sent them
spinning into space. Then all set out on foot to cross the five-
thousand-foot peaks that lay between them and the sea. Some
took other routes, but on any of the roads their fate was the
same. They trudged in mud and snow over the mountain
passes, the December wind piercing their ragged uniforms.
Many fell dead, some died of hunger. They were passing
through one of the poorest parts of Europe, and the inhabitants
had little to sell them, and in any case were instructed to with-
hold what they had by the King of Montenegro, who though
he was Serbia's ally and King Peter’s father-in-law, had come
to a treacherous understanding with Austria. The Serbians ate
the raw flesh of the animals which fell dead by the track, they
ate their boots. Some died of dysentery. Some were shot by
Albanian snipers. Of the quarter of a million Serbian soldiers
one hundred thousand met such deaths. Of thirty-six thousand
boys nearing military age who had joined the retreat to escape
the Austrians over twenty thousand perished on this road. Of
fifty thousand Austrian and German prisoners, who had had
to follow the Serbians because their own military authorities
had refused to exchange them, the greater part never came
down from the mountains.

When the survivors reached the coast they found that the
Allies again had failed them. The port they arrived at was
blocked with shipping sunk by Austrian submarines and it was
impossible either to bring them food or to ship them away.
They had to trudge southwards, still hungry. Too much of
the responsibility for their safety rested on the Italians, who

6o6 BLACK LAMB AND GREY FALCON

had already signed thf Treaty of London, and knew that if the
Serbian nation should by a miracle reconstitute itself it would
certainly dispute the allocations of Slav territory made by that
imbecile document. At last the French and the British settled
that the Serbians should be sent to the Greek island of Corfu,
since Greece was under obligations to the Allies which not even
their diplomacy could whoUy annul. Still hungry, they were
put on boats to be taken out to the transports. It happened
that, when the first boatloads pushed off, not many hours had
passed since a food ship had been torpedoed in the channel
outside the harbour, and loaves of bread were still floating on
the waves. Many of the Serbians had never seen deeper water
than a fordable stream, and these jumped out of the boats to
wade towards the bread, and sank immediately. Others, who
knew the northern rivers or the lakes of Ochrid or Presba, tried
to hold back those who wanted to jump, and there were struggles
which overturned some of the boats. Thus many were drowned.

On Corfu the Serbian army fell down and slept. Some
never awoke. For quite a long time there was still not enough
food, and there was a shortage of fuel. Every night for weeks
boats put out to sea weighed down with those who had been
too famished and diseased to recover. The others stirred as soon
as the spring warmed them, stretched, and looked up into the
sunshine, and were again golden and young and victorious,
golden and ancient and crafty, as they had been in the Balkan
wars. Alexander, restored to health, travelled to Paris, Rome
and London, and urged on the Allies the value of an expedition-
ary force that would use Salonica as a base and would strike
up at the forces the Central powers were maintaining in Serbia.
He carried his case, and his troops were drilled, equipped again,
inspired again. In summer they embarked for Salonica. A
year after they had been driven out of Serbia they were back
on Serbian soil, fighting the Bulgars. In September 1916 they
put forth their strength and took Kaimakshalan, the Butter-
churn, the mountain that dominates the southern plains of
Macedonia and the road to the north and had been thought
impregnable. In effect the Near Eastern campaign was over.
But the war was not sufficiently mature in its other theatres to
make it safe to harvest the victory, so the Serbian army sat in
Macedonia and waited. In the summer of 1917 the Serbian
Government and a committee of South Slavs issued a manifesto

SERBIA

607

proclaiming a “ Kingdom of Serbs, Croats, and Slovenes, a
democratic and parliamentary monarchy under the Karageorge*
vitch dynasty, giving equality of treatment to the three religions,
Orthodox, Catholic and Mussulman, and in the use of the
Latin and Cyrillic alphabets They announced in fact, that
the Austro-Hungarian Empire was destroyed and that out of
its ruins they were making a kingdom of the South Slavs, such
as had inherited the glory of Byzantium eight hundred years
before. The poem was now written. In the autumn of 1918
the Serbian armies, as the spearhead of the Allied .forces, drove
into the enemy forces and scattered the Bulgars back to Bulgaria,
the Austrians and Germans back to a land which was no land,
which had lost all institutions, even all its characteristics, save
that discontent which springs of conceiving poems too formless
and violent ever to be written. The more poetic nation was in
Belgrade thirteen days before the Armistice.

Belgrade VIII

What sequel to this story would not be an anti-climax ?
There arc heights which the corporate life has never surpassed
and which it attains only at rare intervals. It is not so with
the personal life, for the mind, in its infinite creativeness, can
always transcend any external event. To King Peter, it may
be, the war was only prelude to a greater experience. He had
taken no part in the campaign of 1918, since by that time he
could only hobble. He went to Greece, and did not leave it
even when victory was achieved. The state entry into Belgrade
took place without him. He lingered where he was till late in
1919, and then went north, but no further than Arandzhovats,
the simple and even shabby spa near the Karageorgevitches’
old home at Topola. One day, without warning, he returned
to Belgrade, which did not recognise him, for while he was in
Greece he had grown a long white beard like a priest’s. The
Prince Regent and his people welcomed him, and begged him
to take up residence in the palace, but that he would not do, for
he said it would be wrong, since he was no longer king. It is
proof of the strangeness of the Karageorgevitches and their
ambivalent attitude to their own royalty, that Alexander also
would not move into the palace, though it was new and comfort-

6o8 BLACK LAMB AND GREY FALCON

able. He made his home in a simple one-storeyed house in the
main street of the town, which he furnished hardly more com-
fortably than if it had been his staff headquarters in time of war.

Peter went to live in a villa overlooking Topchider, the
park where Prince Michael of Serbia was murdered and little
Alexander Obrenovitch learned to swim, and he became more
and more of a recluse. He was not indifferent to his people ;
he cut off his beard because they complained that it disguised
their beloved king from them. But all his forces were devoted
to a relationship which it is hard to imagine. The Karageorge-
vitches were not now a united family. Alexander was busy
forging the new state of Yugoslavia into a reality, and was
working all day and half the night. Peter’s brother, Arsenius,
was not without the strain of frivolity that had made his cousins,
Alexis and Bozhidar, such well-known boulevardiers, and he
had returned to Paris, where he was to prove that there are
many paths to a serene old age. The son of Arsenius and
Aurora Demidoff, Prince Paul, was virtually secretary to the
Prince Regent, and worked as hard as his chief. A cloud had
fallen between Peter’s only daughter, Yelena, and her relatives.
She, having married the Grand Duke Constantine, had been
caught up in the Russian Revolution. Her husband had been
killed and she had been put in prison, from which she was
released only through the intervention of a Serbian officer who
had joined the Bolsheviks. On her return to Belgrade it began
to be whispered that the family reunion had been quickly marred
by disagreements. The stories that attempted to account for
this unhappy state of affairs by some pedantic splitting of hairs
on King Alexander’s part are not worth recording. It may be
taken as certain that they were Balkan fantasies, spun by out-
siders to explain a quarrel that for insiders had some more
prosaic, and possibly intangible, cause. But the fact remains
that the Grand Duchess soon left Yugoslavia for ever and settled
in Switzerland. There were no others in the family except
Peter’s elder son, George.

Peter had dispossessed George of his birthright and given
his crown to his younger brother ; and daily George’s mind was
growing wilder and more restless. It might have been judged
dangerous that the father and son should live together in the
quiet villa at Topchider. But they were very happy. Peter
treated his son with a gentle devotion which guided him away

SERBIA

6oq

from tragedy. The old King was no longer what Geneva and
France had made him, he had lost the Western sense that a man’s
life ought to describe a comprehensible pattern. He was not
appalled when George laughed or wept louder than was reason-
able, or sent a bullet without cause out into the night. If his
handsome son’s spirit was wandering where it could not be
followed, it might be that he too was seeking wisdom. They
lived together in perfect love, and when the old man lost his
wits and fell mortally ill in the summer of 1921, George upheld
him with his patient kindness. At the time of the death the
Prince Regent was in Paris, and the news threw him into a
state of collapse so complete that his doctor forbade him to
travel back to Belgrade for the funeral. So George was his
father's chief mourner, and performed his duties with great
dignity. Thereafter he was seen no more among ordinary men.
Enemies of Alexander say that this was due to fraternal hate,
but that is not the opinion of foreigners who came in accidental
contact with the elder brother.

Alexander was not permitted by his duties to cultivate the
personal life. He must struggle with the external world, so
anti-climax was his lot ; and he resented it, for he was perhaps
the last ruler in the world to be inspired by a Homeric con-
ception of life. The day should always be at the dawn, all men
should be heroes, the sword should decide rightly. He found
himself, on the contrary, smothered with small mean difhculties.
These were the harder to bear because he had foreseen them and
would have avoided them if it had not been for the blindness of
others. He was unable to proceed with the real business of
state-making because, do what he would, he could not secure
unity among the Croats and Slovenes and Serbs ; but he
himself had never wished to include the Croats and Slovenes
in his kingdom. He had hoped, at the beginning of the war,
not for a Yugoslavia, not for a union of all South Slavs, but for
a Greater Serbia that should add to the kingdom of Serbia all
the Austro-Hungarian territories in which the majority of the
inhabitants were Serbs, that is Slavs who were members of the
Orthodox Church. The school of thought to which he belonged
rightly considered the difference between the Roman Catholic
and the Orthodox Churches so great that it transcended racial
or linguistic unity.

It cannot be doubted that this Greater Serbia would have

6io BLACK LAMB AND GREY FALCON

been a far more convenient entity than Yugoslavia, but it could
exist only on two conditions : it must be supported on the east
by the Russian Empire, and divided on the west from German-
speaking countries by Catholic Slav states. In 1917, however,
the Tsardom fell in ruins, and of all the Slav subjects of the
Austrian Empire the Czechs alone were sufficiently highly
organised to convince the peacemakers that they could be
entrusted with the governance of an independent state. So
Serbia had need of the Catholic Slavs and they had need of
her ; and the Kingdom of the Serbs, Croats and Slovenes, as
Yugoslavia was then called, became inevitable. But that did
not annul the temperamental incompatibilities of the Serbs and
the Croats, which faced the King with a sea of troubles.

It is likely that Alexander was the less able to bear these
dissensions with equanimity because of the personal tragedy
that had befallen him during the war. We now know that while
he was a student at the Military Academy in St. Petersburg he
had fallen in love with one of the Tsar’s daughters, though she
was still a schoolgirl. He had mentioned it to his father, who
had asked the Tsar if Alexander would be allowed to present
himself as a suitor when the girl was of a proper age, and had
received an encouraging answer. In January 1914 Mr. Pashitch,
the Serbian Prime Minister, visited Russia to enquire whether,
now that the Balkan wars were over, Alexander might begin
his courtship, and the permission was given. It is probable that
Alexander would have gone on this errand shortly after he had
been declared Regent, had not the war broken out.

We cannot be certain that this courtship would have been
successful, for we know that the Tsar’s daughters were allowed
to choose for themselves in such matters, and that the Tsarina
wished none of them to marry outside Russia. But it is beyond
doubt that this was for Alexander a real affair of the heart. He
did not merely want to be the husband of one of the Tsar’s
daughters. He wanted to have this particular daughter as his
wife. In March 191 7 the news came that the Tsar had abdicated
and that he and his family were in the hands of the revolu-
tionaries. Some time in July 1918, while Alexander was in
the sweltering heat of the Macedonian plains, all of them
were put to death at Ekaterinburg. It seems reasonable to
ascribe Alexander’s hatred of Bolshevism at least as much to
this event as to temperamental bias or political prejudices.

SERBIA

6ii

For a very long time no other woman seems to have con-
vinced him that she existed. After his father’s death he looked
about for a wife, but plainly only for dynastic reasons ; and
though the Princess Marie of Roumania was very beautiful, he
probably chose her rather for her English connections and her
Romanoff blood. But he became devoted to her, and derived
very great happiness from his life with her and their three sons.
She was indeed an excellent wife for him, as she had inherited
from her mother, the famous Queen Marie, a great deal of the
fluency and brilliance that he lacked. She liked driving a high-
powered automobile over mountains down to the Adriatic, she
was fond of Hying. She had also an instinct for comfort which
was welcome in the Balkans. Between the Karageorgevitches’
barbarous and glorious old home at Topola and the tremendous
Byzantine assertion of majesty and death at Oplenats there
lies, set among orchards and vineyards, a cottage planned by
the Queen, where she and Alexander and the children lived
the kind of home life, uncultured but civilised and amiable, that
Queen Victoria made common form for European royalty. It
is as if the Karageorgevitches, usually immersed in the tide of
their terrible and splendid experience, had for a moment come
to the surface to breathe.

The King had his marriage to console him, and, perhaps,
his ambition. For he was still ambitious. He had come a very
long way in his thirty-odd years. He had spent his childhood
as the son of a pretender almost comic in his destitution, in a
poky flat in Geneva, as a youth he had been lifted to a step of the
Romanoff throne, and as a young man he had overthrown an
imperial dominance that had pressed on his people for five
hundred years, and before he was yet a ripe man had driven
back another empire, the most formidable of Continental powers,
and thereby reincarnated the glory of the Emperor Stephen
Dushan. It is said that he meant to travel still further. He
would never consent to be crowned. Though he was so resolute
that the Karageorgevitch stock should be grafted on the
Nemanya dynasty, no fresh door was ever opened for him in
the crimson wall of Zhitcha Cathedral and walled up when he
left it an anointed king, according to ancient custom. There is
reason to suspect that he was postponing the ceremony till he
might be crowned not king but emperor, and that of an empire
greater than Stephen Dushan ever knew.

6ia BLACK LAMB AND GREY FALCON

Alexander took a great into^st in the internal condition of
Russia, and he was convinced that the Bolshevik regime would
not last more than twenty or thirty years. During this time he
hoped to make a Balkan Federation, a real union of South
Slavs, which might go in and rescue the North Slavs when
Bolshevism had collapsed. Then he would he crowned in
Zhitcha as King of Serbia and Emperor of all the Russias.

This dream was not as insane as it sounds to Western
readers. The South Slav loves the Russian, White or Red, but
he does not think him as efficient as himself, and the task of
overthrowing Bolshevism would not seem to him any greater
than his conquest of the Turk. Nor was it purely aggressive.
The King believed, and was right in his belief, that the Slavs
needed to protect themselves against Italy, Hungary and the
German-speaking peoples ; and the firmer they were in unity
the better. But whatever his plans and their justification, they
involved Herculean labours. His heart, however, approved of
Herculean labours ; what afflicted him beyond bearing was the
business which fell to him in the meantime, of settling the small
differences of small men.

The primary disease of Yugoslavia was the same that was
wasting every European country which had taken part in the
war : a shortage of young and middle-aged men. Three-fifths
of Serbia’s man-power had been lost, and nine-tenths of the
university students who had been made non-commissioned
officers. The Croats had suffered terribly fighting for the
Austrian Empire. It was, as it always is in war, the flowers that
had fallen. There were no young and able leaders coming up,
the pre-war politicians were worn out with age and responsibility,
second-rate adventurers were taking advantage of the dearth
of better men to obtain office for the sake of profit, and the
distracted rank and file wrangled over these unsatisfactory
leaders. The King suffered at all times from the professional
soldier’s inability to distinguish between an argument and a
mutiny ; but now he had some real excuse for finding the
political controversies of his subjects disquieting.

There was another element in the situation which was
common to all combatant countries at this time ; the old
Liberalism was faced with problems for which it had no solution.
Although the King had been tempted in his youth into a flirta-
tion with his brother’s Pretorian Guard type of Fascism, he had

SERBIA

613

been educated as an old-fashioned Liberal and probably would
have remained one had circumstances allowed it. But they did
not. It is extremely difficult to maintain the freedom of the
press, when that is used by different parties to advocate the
assassination of each other's leaders. It is extremely difficult
not to throw people into prison without trial if disorder is so
great that the law courts dare not convict the most guilty dis-
turbers of the peace. And the King could not discuss his
difficulties with his Liberal subjects, because he was incapable
of understanding intellectuals.

Artists he might have understood better. He had grown
up in contemplation of a historic poem, and was passionately
fond of music, and his cousin and closest friend. Prince Paul,
was a lover of great painting. But with intellectuals he had
nothing in common. He could not — and perhaps this was
because he was something of an artist — understand why they
could not suppress their faculty of criticism in order to follow
a common purpose. Underneath the great mountain of
Durmitor in Montenegro there lies a dark and glassy lake,
mirroring many snow peaks, which are doubly pure in their
reflection, with the purity of their own snow, with the purity
of its black crystal waters. By this lake the King once camped
for thirteen days. To one of the secretaries who brought state
papers to his tent he said, his prim voice trembling, “ If those
intellectuals in Belgrade could come here and look at this lake
as I have done they would not . . . they would not . . ."
This is an idiotic remark from the point of view of those in-
tellectuals who were defending the rights of man, who were
protesting against innocent people being thrown into prison
and the suppression of free speech. But it is not an idiotic
remark from the point of view of a man who had realised the
vision of the Frushka Gora.

The King was further handicapped by his inability, which
was greater than one would have expected in a man of his age,
to understand anything at all about the post-war Left Wing.
He thought it sheer wickedness that many of his subjects should
sympathise with Bolshevik itussia and that some should join
the Communist Party. He asked why the very people who were
most shocked if he used force against the Croats, no matter how
mildly, should accept the Red massacres without a murmur,
and he put the question without the capacity to listen to the

VOL. I 2 R

6i4 black lamb and GREY FALCON

answer, for he was thinking of a murdered girl. When he was
told that this attitude was part of a revolt against poverty, he
replied that there was no need for such a revolt, since people in
his kingdom were much better off than they used to be, and if
the country were allowed to settle down, there was every hope
that this might continue. In this he was perfectly accurate, yet
quite irrelevant. A man who is hungry is suffering from an
absolute discomfort, and cannot be comforted by the statement,
or even believe it, that he was often hungrier when he was a
boy, and that his father had been hungrier still.

Nor could the King understand why the intellectuals kept
on talking about peace. In Belgrade there was once held an
exhibition of German pictures which had been selected by a
Serbian official in the Yugoslav Legation at Berlin. When the
King visited it he made a conscientious inspection of the
pictures, and then sent for this official. Instead of congratulating
him he coldly censured him for including certain canvases by
Kathe Kollwitz which were designed to expose the horrors of
warfare. This and other manifestations of his distaste for
pacifism were regarded by the Left Wing as proof of the blood-
thirstiness of the man, but in that they were wholly mistaken.'
Few generals in modern history have experienced the horrors
of warfare as fully as he had, and his was not the temperament
which intoxicates itself with action. But he believed that it
might be necessary again for Yugoslavia to fight for its life,
and he therefore saw the discouragement of the fighting spirit
as a step towards national suicide. He entirely forgot that it is
the proper function of the intellectual to hold up certain moral
values before the eyes of the people, even if it is not possible to
realise them in action at the moment. But it must be conceded
that his situation made that forgetfulness inevitable.

The King was, of course, entirely right in his assumption
that Yugoslavia might have to fight for her life. Recent years,
by bringing so many ill-favoured personalities to the fore, have
made Mussolini seem by contrast genial and almost inoffensive,
but we must not forget that he, owes that character entirely
to contrast. A face which might seem reassuringly normal in a
criminal lunatic asylum might repel and terrify in a railway
carriage. The part that Mussolini played in Yugoslavian
affairs as soon as he had acceded to power was purely evil. He
screamed insults at them for their possession of Dalmatia and

SERBIA

6is

constantly provoked riots and disorder ; but that was the most
innocent 'hide of his relations with the country. There were two
main centres of disafifection in Yugoslavia, Croatia and Mace-
donia, and in these Mussolini attempted to establish himself
as a murderous enemy of civil peace. In Croatia he found it
at first difficult to get a footing, for the rebels were for the most
part men of high principle who had their wits about them and
knew what happens when the lamb asks the fox for aid against
the wolf. But the Macedonians were at once more criminal
and more innocent. Their case was pitiful, for it was the result
of ancient virtues running to waste in an altered world. The
Macedonians, a magnificent people, had prepared the way for
the Balkan wars by a perpetual revolt, sometimes open, some-
times covert, against the Turk. This was organised by the
Internal Macedonian Revolutionary Organisation — known as
I.M.R.O. — which was formed in 1893 by Bulgarian Mace-
donians, bloodthirsty men who were nevertheless great heroes
and pitiable victims.

When the Turks were driven out as a result of the Balkan
wars Macedonia was divided between Greece, Serbia and Bul-
garia ; and Bulgaria greatly resented the terms of the division.
Some Bulgars wanted a purely Bulgarian Macedonia ; others
wanted an independent Macedonia, a dream state which was
to be entirely free, though it would have had to be financed and
to a large extent repopulated from abroad ; others again wanted
a federated state, similar to a Swiss canton. All these parties
consisted of those who had been revolutionaries all their born
days and who could no more have taken to a conforming way
of life than an elderly seamstress could become a ballet dancer.
They were also subjected to great provocation by the harshness
of the Yugoslavs in forcing the many Bulgarian inhabitants of
their newly acquired territory to speak Serbian and alter their
names to Serbian forms, and the incompetence of many of the
Yugoslav officials, which was, indeed, no greater than that
which had been shown by the Turks or would have been shown
by the Bulgarians, but was none the less (and very naturally)
resented. They therefore reconstituted I.M.R.O. as an anti-
Yugoslav organisation.

In no time they formed a guerilla army which had its head-
quarters near the frontier tuid repeatedly crossed it on raids into
Yugoslav Macedonia, burning and looting and killing just as

6i6 BLACK LAMB AND GREY FALCON

in the old Turkish days. Of the damage done there can be no
acctirate estimate, for the peasantry was too terrorised to report
its losses to the officials ; but it is said that over a thousand
violent deaths are known to have occurred between the years
1924 and 1934. This reign of horror might have gone un-
chronicled, for the government of neither Yugoslavia nor Bul-
garia wished to publish the shameful inability to keep order,
had it not been that passengers on the Athens “express gazed
astonished, since they knew that Europe was theoretically at
peace, on the unbroken line of barbed-wire entanglements,
block-houses, redoubts and searchlight posts which followed
the Yugoslav-Bulgarian frontier. Every bridge and tunnel and
station was guarded by soldiers in full battle kit ; and even so
the passenger on the Athens express sometimes ceased abruptly
to gaze and wonder, for I.M.R.O. liked to get bombs aboard
the international trains, since explosions were reported in news-
papers all over the world, and gave their cause publicity. But if
the passenger was spared to continue his thoughts he might well
have asked himself how I.M.R.O. could afford to maintain the
standing army whose assaults made necessary this vigilant and
elaborate defence, for the Macedonian peasantry was notori-
ously among the poorest in Europe.

There was, indeed, more reason for this question than even
the prodigious view from the carriage window. I.M.R.O. pub-
lished newspapers and pamphlets in Bulgaria and abroad. It
maintained propaganda offices in all the Western capitals. It
specialised in curious slow-motion assassinations that cost a
great deal of money ; a member would be sent to a distant place
to murder an enemy of the cause and would be ordered not to
do it at once, but to live beside him for some months before
striking the blow. It also ran an expensive and efficient machine
in Sofia which for many years dominated Bulgarian politics ;
indeed, I.M.R.O. became the Fascist Party of Bulgaria, murder-
ing Stambulisky, the great leader of the Peasant Party, and
routing the Communist Party, though that numbered a fourth
of the electorate. In this last feat they were aided by the inde-
cisiveness of the General Secretary of the Bulgarian Com-
munist Party, one Dimitrov, later to be famous for his not at all
indecisive part in the Reichstag trial. But that and all their
other feats cost money. Some of this was given gladly by
Macedonian supporters. Some of it was filched from Mace-

SERBIA

617

donians, whether supporters or not, by an efficient system of
illegal taxation. The tax-collector, who whether he was a be-
liever in a Bulgarian Macedonia or not had kin in the country
whose safety he valued, produced two tax demands, one to be
paid to the Bulgarian Government, and the other, amounting
to ten per cent of the first, to be paid through him to I.M.R.O.
But for a great part its funds were provided by Italy.

If Alexander sometimes acted brutally towards the insurgents
he saw conspiring with foreign powers against the safety of his
people, and towards the intellectuals who showed themselves
so blind to the implications of these conspiracies, he cannot be
altogether blamed. The situation was too confusing. It cannot
have clarified it that no hostile act against a malcontent ever
cost the King so dearly as the act of reconciliation he made with
his arch-enemy, which seemed for long a great political triumph
and was certainly his greatest moral triumph. This was the
root of all the troubles that darkened the last six years of his
life. From the first the leader of the Croat Peasant Party,
Stefan Raditch, had been a thorn in the King’s side. Not even
Gandhi had a more magnetic effect on his followers, and though
he guided them in all sorts of different directions he could claim
consistency, for he never took them down a road that did not
lead away from Serbia. Before the war he had been anti-
Hungarian but fiercely pro-Austrian, with a deep veneration
for the Hapsburgs, and he had advocated the creation of a
triune kingdom comprising Austria, Hungary and a Greater
Croatia which should include a conquered Serbia. After the
war he preached an independent Croatia in the form of a
republic where no taxes would be collected from peasants, pre-
vented the Croat deputies from going to Belgrade and taking
their seats in the Skupshtina, and attacked the Government in
terms that, not at all inexplicably, led every now and then to
his imprisonment.

In 1923 this situation should have been materially changed.
He went to London and Mr. Wickham Steed, the former editor
of The Times, one of the few Englishmen who understood
Balkan conditions, urged him to give up his republicanism,
and work to shear the Yugoslavian constitution of certain
undemocratic features and convert it into a constitutional
monarchy on the English pattern. Raditch afterwards said
he was convinced. But he omitted to mention this change of

6i8 BLACK LAMB AND GREY FALCON

heart when he returned to Yugoslavia, and he was imprisoned
and his party was declared illegal, largely because he had come
back by way of Russia. This punitive action of the King and
his Government was unwise and ill-tempered, but was not as
silly as it seems. Raditch's own account was that he had called
on Lenin to advise him to abandon Bolshevism and set up a
peasant republic. It seems certain that he was moved to this
trip partly by his love of travel, which was inordinate. But
detached observers among the Bolsheviks believed he came to
Moscow in order to blackmail Belgrade with the fear of social
revolution, and it appears that while there he joined the Peasant
International. Once he found himself in prison, however, he
sent for his nephew and dictated to him a confession of his
belief in the monarchy and the constitution.

Immediately the King was told of this declaration he ap-
pointed Raditch Minister of Education and gave ministerial
posts to three leading members of his illegal party. It is proof
of the strange political nature of the Croats that, though this
was the first indication Raditch’s followers had received that
he had completely changed his programme, they do not seem
to have been disconcerted for more than a short time. Raditch
went straight from prison to the King’s palace, and there the
two enemies sat down, talked for hours, and fell into an instant
friendship. This was unbroken for five years. The royal house-
hold became very fond of him, and he constantly came to the
palace simply as a familiar. He was a fine linguist, and the
Queen liked speaking English with him. As his sight was failing
she used to take his plate at meal-times and cut up his food for
him. The King learned to like him better than he had liked any
politician since the war.

In 1928 there fell the catastrophe. The country was in a
disturbed state, and complained of many troubles. Some of
these were inevitable : it had been necessary to unify the
currencies of the country into a single unit, and a certain
amount of inflation had followed. Some of these might easily
have been avoided : the political parties were perpetually dis-
integrating into smaller and smaller factions, and this made it
almost impossible for any government to maintain itself in
power over any period sufficient for effective action. In ten
years twenty-one political parties came forward to save Yugo-
slavia, and there were twenty-five changes of government.

SERBIA

619

Raditch was still a Minister. It must be confessed that he had
brought nothing new into political life, and that he had done
little to distinguish himself from the Serbian Ministers he had
for so long attacked. At this point, though he was theoretically
Left, he suddenly demanded a military dictatorship. " Our
national army," he told the King, " which is our national shrine
in its finest form, can perhaps alone provide a generally recog-
niseef leader, strong enough to drive away corruption unmerci-
fully, as well as lawlessness, to destroy partisanship in adminis-
tration, and to overcome the political terrorism which is turning
our entire country into a huge penitentiary.” This infuriated
alike the political parasites and the sincere democrats of Yugo-
slavia, and to justify himself he carried on a campaign against
corruption, defining the abuses which he thought made a dicta-
torship imperative, and named their perpetrators.

The baser newspapers called for his blood, desiring quite
literally that someone should shed it. But it must be admitted
that he himself conducted this campaign with less than perfect
wisdom. He was violently provocative in a situation where the
most pressing need was calm ; and his violence was unrestrained.
He was capable of standing up in Parliament and calling his
fellow-Ministers swine. It was also unfortunate that the Ger-
manic bias he derived from Austria made him speak con-
temptuously of all races outside the sphere of German influence.
With difficulty, and only under the influence of the King and
Queen, he had learned to accept the Serbians, but the remoter
peoples of wilder Yugoslavia were hardly better than Negroes
seen through the eyes of Southerners. He used the term
" Tsintsar ” as an insult, as if it meant a kind of human mongrel,
although the Tsintsari are a race of shepherds who have gone
respectably about their business on the Macedonian uplands
since the days of Byzantium. He was completely insensible to
the poetry of the Yugoslavian idea, to the charity that inspired
it in spite of its blunders and brutalities. It meant nothing to
him, and to most Croats, that people had been rescued from the
power of Islam and were restored to Christian civilisation in the
shelter of this state.

June is not a favourable month in Serbian history. On the
twentieth of June 1928 a Montenegrin deputy named Punisha
Rachitch, who was among those charged with corruption,
entered the Skupshtina and fired five shots from a revolver.

620 BLACK LAMB AND GREY FALCON

With these he killed outright a Croat deputy named Basarichek,
a brilliant and beloved man, and Raditch's nephew Paul, he
slightly wounded two other Croat deputies, and he mortally
wounded Raditch himself. Six weeks afterwards this strange
and inconclusive genius died. The King was constantly at his
bedside, pale and trembling with grief. The wounded man
gripped his hand when the pain was worst. During those
weeks there went on a pathetic wrangle, which later events
were to make bitterly ironical. “ When you are well," the King
said, " you must be Prime Minister.” “ No, no,” answered
Raditch, ” it must be a general.” He had already picked a
general for the job, one Zhikovitch. But others could see that all
such talk was idle, and soon he was taken home to Zagreb to die.
On his deathbed he uttered many wishes, which were also to be
made bitterly ironical in later years, that none of his followers
should seek to avenge his death, and that the Croats and the
Serbs were to come to the fullest and most ungrudging recon-
ciliation.

It is almost incredible that King Alexander should have
been blamed for Raditch’s death. He had much to lose by it
and nothing whatsoever to gain. But there was brought up
against him what is true enough, that a sinister association
binds the name of Karageorgevitch to murder. Prince Michael
of Serbia, King Alexander Obrenovitch and Queen Draga, the
Archduke Franz Ferdinand and Sophie Chotek, all had been
murdered and all had been enemies of the Karageorgevitches.
It was also recalled that during the war, at Salonica, the famous
" Apis ”, Dragutin Dimitriyevitch, had been found guilty of an
attempt on Alexander’s life, on what seemed strangely slight
evidence, and had been shot. Slavs like telling each other blood-
ciirdling stories, and in the pleasure of these recitals it was
forgotten that Raditch for five years had ceased to be the
King’s enemy.

All these suspicions of the King were held to be confirmed
by the sentence passed on Punisha Rachitch. He was adjudged
insane and sent to a lunatic asylum. This was regarded as a
ruse adopted to evade the plain duty of exacting the death
penalty. But many murders have been committed by rebeb,
including Croats, who have suffered nothing worse than im-
prisonment and it is just possible that Punisha Rachitch was
insane. He was a man of outstanding ability who, in spite

SERBIA

621

of having studied law in Paris, had remained essentially the
chief of a primitive tribe, and he had done valuable work in
establishing order on the new Yugoslav-Albanian frontier. This
involved a certain amount of savage suppression, for the
Albanians and pro-Austrian Montenegrins were raiding Serb
villages, murdering travellers and cutting down telephone wires.
The educated comitadjis often cracked. They saw more horrors
and felt more fear than the subtilised mind can endure. In
1919, when Punisha Rachitch arrested an English captain who
was touring the country on the business of an allied commission,
his recorded proceedings suggest a certain degree of hallucinated
arrogance.

But whether Rachitch was sane or mad hardly mattered ; it
mattered so much more that in any case it would have been
extremely difficult for the King and the Government to inflict
on him the death penalty. He was adored by the Montenegrin
tribesmen who were his constituents. He was a man of superb
physique, which always counts for much among virile com-
munities, and of undoubted courage ; and he had a high
reputation as a shrewd and impartial judge of local disputes.
In the eyes of these tribesmen he must have been perfectly
justified in the murder he committed, for Raditch had attacked
his honour. If Rachitch had been tried on charges of corruption
by a legal tribunal they would have recognised another victory
for the new state which was invading their lives and which,
whether for better or worse, was proving irresistible. But the
Government (of which, it must be remembered, Raditch was a
member) never had prosecuted Rachitch. So there was, for the
tribesmen, simply an old and familiar situation : two chiefs
undermined each other’s credit by abuse till the only way of
finding the better man was by murder. The Government might
be crotchety about such matters as graft, though that seemed
unreasonable enough, since the tribesmen accepted the payment
of tribute to strong individuals as a natural practice ; but when
it came to a large classic situation like murder among chiefs
it was no use putting up new-fangled ideas. Because of this
attitude the execution of Rachitch might have caused serious
unrest among the Montenegrins : and here we are faced again
with the early, pre-genial Mussolini. He was financing a large
number of Montenegrin insurgents in order to further his
designs on Albania, and would certainly have used the death of

622 BLACK LAMB AND GREY FALCON

Rachitch to stir up well-armed revolt. It would so greatly have
profited the King to tamper with justice and save Rachitch from
his proper punishment on a false plea of madness, that most
people took it for granted that he took that course. There is no
possible means, short of the appearance of Punisha Rachitch
before an independent medical board, by which we can tell
whether this is the case or not.

After that catastrophe nothing went right. The King was
left alone on the political stage. The obvious step was to form a
Coalition Ministry. It was impossible to appoint a Serb. Since
a Roman Catholic had been killed by a member of the Orthodox
Church, the whole faith must perform an act of penance. It
proved impossible to appoint a Croat, for Raditch’s successor,
Matchek, and all Croat deputies except a few freaks, withdrew
to Zagreb and refused to take their seats again in the Skupshtina.
It is hard to understand why they did this. It was contrary to
Raditch’s wishes ; they cannot have thought that they owed it
to their loyalty to him to flout the Serbs, for he had been
murdered by a Montenegrin, and the Serbs were notoriously on
bad terms with the Montenegrins ; and had they collaborated
with the Serbs at this time they could have extracted from them
every concession they wanted short of actual Home Rule. These
were the realities of the situation. But the Croat Peasant Party
preferred to react to the baser newspapers, which continued to
attack Raditch after his death, and to the Serbian political bosses
who inspired them, though with the King against them these
had little chance of survival.

There remained only the Slovenes, and their leader. Father
Koroshets, was appointed Prime Minister. The Slovenes are
a sensible and unexcitable people who had had better oppor-
tunities than their compatriots to live at peace. Much of the
trouble between the Croats and the Serbs had arisen because
their language was identical and Serb officials could be sent to
administer Croat territory. But the Slovene tongue differs
greatly from Serbo-Croat, and the Slovenes had been left to
govern themselves in peace. It is only fair to the Serbs to
recognise that the Slovenes are not of the same oppositionist
temperament as the Croats and therefore can be trusted with
self-government. But the Church had supplied the Slovenes
with a leader not up to the standard of his followers. Anton
Koroshets had been the confessor of the last Empress of

SERBIA

6*3

Hungary, Zita, and he represented the sombre and reactionary
type of Catholicism cultivated by the Hapsburgs. His spirit
was therefore blind to the fundamental problems presented by
the ancient and the modem world and moved busily in an
etiquette-ridden bourgeois nineteenth-century limbo which had
no correspondence with reality. This made him a pastmaster of
political intrigue, and a calamitous and irritating statesman. It
was his imbecile custom to respond to the challenge of troubled
times by using manifestos which ascribed all his country's
ills to revolutionary movements engendered by Communists,
Jews and Freemasons. But there are very few Communists in
Yugoslavia ; the Jews are a stable body of traders producing
few intellectuals ; there are practically no Freemasons in
Croatia and Slovenia, and Serbia is the only place in the world
where Freemasonry gathers together the forces of reaction. It
happened that under Alexander Obrenovitch a pro-Austrian
and anti-democratic politician was Grand Master of the Belgrade
Lodge and used it as a centre of intrigue with the lodges of
Vienna and Budapest, and at that time all masons of pro-
gressive sympathies resigned and have never rejoined. All
Koroshets’ interventions in Yugoslav politics were on this level,
and it is not surprising that in this crisis he proved unable to
lead the country.

His failure left the King with only one course to follow : to
obey Raditch’s advice and establish a military dictatorship. In
January 1929, after six months’ turmoil, he dissolved Parlia-
ment, and made General Zhikovitch his Prime Minister, to be
responsible to the Crown and not to the deputies. This was a
complete breach with the Karageorgevitch tradition ; for it
involved the infringement of the constitution and the dynasty
had always been defenders of constitutionalism. The King,
with his narrow and intense concentration on the idea of his
royalty, must have known that he had put an axe to the root
of his power the minute he decided to exercise it absolutely :
and General Zhikovitch could do nothing to repair this injury.
It is proof of the essential capriciousness of Raditch’s character
that he should have advised the King to entrust himself and his
country to this obscure man. His respectable but undis-
tinguished military career had brought him no prestige, and
while he had a passion for political intrigue he was completely
ignorant of political principles.

634 BLACK LAMB AND GREY FALCON

He was, however, a perfect instrument for the King. It is
said that Raditch had proposed him as dictator only to expose
his inefficiency and emptiness; and such tortuousness can be
believed of Raditch. Completely at a loss, Zhikovitch had to
obey the King. For a time there was a superficial improvement
in Yugoslavian affairs, because the dictatorship put into effect
various necessary reforms — many concerning public utilities —
which had been held up in the Skupshtina by regional and
personal rivalries. In the preceding ten years Parliament had
passed only no laws. The King and Zhikovitch passed ii8
laws and 535 minor decrees in twelve months, and most of these
were in accordance with the people’s wishes. They also pro-
mulgated new penal and civil codes. Then the Nemesis of
dictatorship laid its paralysing hand on the King’s shoulder.
The dictator seizes power, and it is yielded to him, because
Parliament has failed to solve certain fundamental problems
which are vexing the people. But Parliament has failed in that
task only because the human mind has not yet discovered the
solution of those problems. Other minor problems can be
deliberately left unsolved by individuals, classes or regions
which find that the status quo favours their interests. But
nobody would be able to suppress the solution of a major
problem, such as war or poverty, if only because the existence
of an enormously complicated idea — such as the solution of a
complicated problem must be — could not be kept a secret,
since it must be the product of the spirit of the age acting on a
number of intellectually active people. It is not possible that
one man alone could have conceived such a solution, because
the range of variation in our species is extremely small, par-
ticularly at the top of the scale. A dictator might have an idea
that was not shared by the village idiot ; but it is extremely
unlikely that a dictator would have an idea which had not
already occurred in some comparable form to an elected assembly
of men, some of whom, since the intellect is of some use in
competition, must be of intellectual eminence. The chief
problems of Yugoslavia were its poverty and the antagonisms
felt by sections of the population which had different cultures.
When the King had cleared up the arrears of work that could
be settled by a firm and legible signature, he looked these
problems in the face and realised that he could solve them no
better than the Skupshtina.

SERBIA

6*5

He made some gallant attempts. To tackle the economic
problem, he tried to develop the country’s industries, but luck
was against him, for the world slump began in the autumn of
1929. ' In any case Yugoslavia is primarily an agricultural
countiy, and cannot know prosperity until an answer is found to
.man’s world-wide refusal to pay a fair price for the food he eats.
He also took steps to heal the antagonisms among his subjects,
which showed him a very strange man, pedantic, doctrinaire,
morally earnest, intellectually naive and, at that moment,
desperate and alone. The problem was enormously intricate.
It sprang from the inclusion in the same state of two kinds of
Slavs : Slavs who were the inheritors of the Byzantine tradition
of culture and the primitive Christianity of the Orthodox Church,
and had been informed with the tragic conception of life by the
defeat of Kossovo and the ensuing five hundred years of slavery ;
and Slavs who had been incorporated in the Western bourgeois
system by Austrian influence and were spiritually governed Hjy
the Roman Catholic Church, which owes its tone to a Renais-
sance unknown to the other Slavs, and were experienced in
discomfort but not in tragedy. To reconcile these two elements,
which were different as the panther and the lynx, the King
enforced certain measures which bring tears to the eyes by their
simplicity.

He changed the name of his state from the Kingdom of
Serbs, Croats and Slovenes to Yugoslavia, the country of the
South Slavs ; and, forbidding the use of the old regional names
such as Serbia, Bosnia and the rest, he cut it up into nine
provinces, called after the rivers which ran through them,
except for Dalmatia, which was called the Littoral. He forbade
the existence of the old regional political parties. Thus he
disclosed the innocent hope that if Croatia were called the
Savska Banovina the inhabitants would forget that they were
Croats, would cease to wish to vote for Matchek and would learn
to respect the Macedonians, since they had become the in-
habitants of the Vardarska Banovina ; and thus he committed
a terrible wrong towards his own people. It was a shameful
thing that Serbia, with its glorious history of revolt against the
Turks, should cease to be an entity, and that the Serbian regi-
ments which had amazed the world by their heroism should
have to send their colours to the museums and march under the
new, and as yet meaningless, flag of Yugoslavia. There is no

626 BLACK LAMB AND GREY FALCON

doubt that at this time the King went too far in his desire to
conciliate the Croats. He relaxed his devotion to the Orthodox
Church, so that he should not seem too alien from his Roman
Catholic subjects. He also took a step that was offensive not
only to the Serbs but to common sense when he tried to abolish
the use of the Cyrillic script in the Serb districts and replace it
by the Latin script used by the Croats and in Western Europe.
This Cyrillic script has a great historical significance for the
Serbs, for it is a modification of the Greek alphabet made by
St. Cyril and St. Methodius for the use of their converts when
they came to evangelise the Slavs in the ninth century. But it
is also much better suited than the Latin script to render the
consonants peculiar to the Slav languages, it is virtually the same
that is used in neighbouring Bulgaria, and is almost the same as
that used in Russia, and it can be mastered by any intelligent
person in a couple of days.

* While these measures widened the gulf between the King
and his Serb subjects they did not bring him an inch nearer the
Croats. Strangely enough, though it was Raditch himself who
had urged the establishment of a military dictatorship, nobody
was so hostile to it as his followers. It was then that Italy
found an opportunity to get her foot into Croatia and play the
same part there that she had played in Macedonia. She had an
advantage in finding a willing ally in this enterprise in Hungary,
who had lost Croatia and the rich Danubian territory of the
Voivodina to Yugoslavia and longed for revenge, but otherwise
the soil was more difficult. The Croats had practised a steady
policy of resistance to Hungarian rule, but it was mainly passive ;
and their rulers had not, like the Turks, accustomed them to
the idea of murder. Hence the terrorists hired by Italy and
Hungary to organise a movement on I.M.R.O. lines had, at
first, little success. Neither then nor later did they win over
the main body of the Croat Peasant Party, or indeed of any
Croat political party. It is said that after a year’s work there
were not more than thirty active adherents of the new organisa-
tion ; and though it established training camps in Italy and
Hungary these could not be filled. At enormous expense agents
were sent ever3rwhere where Croats were seeking their fortunes,
France, Belgium, South America, the United States, and
recruited them with cock-and-bull stories of how the Serbs were
massacring their brothers by the thousand. Even this was not

SERBIA 627

too successful, and the Hungarian camp was driven to decoying
Yugoslav peasants over the frontier and kidnapping them.

But the Croat terrorists had their successes. They were far
from inefficient. They distributed treasonable newspapers and
pamphlets all over the world, many most persuasivdy written.
They started an able and unscrupulous propaganda office in
Vienna, which wounded the King’s feelings bitterly and suc-
ceeded in poisoning European opinion ; and they practised here
no less successfully than on the Bulgarian frontier the art of
placing bombs on international trains. This caused the Yugo-
slavian Government endless trouble It was usually foreigners
who were injured, and that made trouble with their govern-
ments ; and the foreigners who were not injured showed them-
selves curiously irritating in their reaction to the measures that
were taken for their protection. An English or French Liberal,
asked to leave his carriage while a police officer searched under
the seats and on the racks, was apt to write home attacking the
t)n-anny of the King’s regime, and to add comments on the
glumness of the searcher, although men are apt to look glum
when doing a job that may cost them their lives. There were
also, as in Macedonia, constant deliveries of arms to the rebels
on a vast scale. Bombs, grenades, rifles, machine-guns, were
brought in by smugglers who frequently murdered Yugoslav
frontier guards, and were deposited in arsenals from which
they were drawn by terrorists, who used them for such purposes
as the blowing-up of an Orthodox church in Zagreb during a
service and the firing of a barracks dormitory full of conscripts.

Nobody came forward to help the King. There was one
man, Svetozar Pribitchevitch, the greatest Liberal journalist
and politician in post-war Yugoslavia, who might have been
expected to furnish him with a policy. He was one of a great
family, descendants of the emigrants who had been led to Hungary
by the holy Arsenius in the seventeenth century, and he had
played a fearless part in the movement for Slav independence
within the Austro-Hungarian Empire. All he had to suggest
was, however, that the King should abdicate and the kingdom
be converted into a republic. This was, in fact, an unpractical
suggestion. The Orthodox Church gave the King a stable
position as the God-appointed head of the State in the minds
of his Serb subjects ; and no possible President had emerged
from the Yugoslavian politics of that time who could have

6a8 BLACK LAMB AND GREY FALCON

supplied by his own qualities any substitute for even that amount
of unifying force. But the King reacted to the blunder with an
excessive rage. Pribitchevitch’s newspaper was suppressed and
he was placed under arrest in his own home. Later he became
ill and the Yugoslavs were humiliated by a request from
President Masaryk that he might be allowed to harbour the
rebel in Czecho-Slovakia.

Everybody failed him. Zhikovitch resigned, hurting the
King intolerably by a frank admission that together they had
made a great mess of Yugoslavia. Father Koroshets demanded
Home Rule for the Croats and the Slovenes, and again the King
showed excessive rage, and ordered him to be interned in
Dalmatia. There was some excuse for his resentment. Koro-
shets had always been treated handsomely by Yugoslavia, and
his famous respect for institutions, which was the card with
which he always trumped the democratic ace, might well have
been extended to the Karageorgevitch dynasty. Then Matchek,
Raditch’s successor, put in a claim for the Croat right of self-
determination, and was arrested and sentenced to three years’
imprisonment. At this both Croats and Serbs were outraged,
but the King was implacable. It must be remembered in his
defence that these programmes were completely unfeasible.
The Catholic Slavs of the kingdom, who numbered five and a
half million, had no sort of chance of maintaining their existence
as an independent state. Inevitably some would have been
absorbed by Italy and others by Hungary, and we have the
spectacle of the four hundred thousand Slovenes at present in
Italy and the memory of what the Croats and Serbs of the
Voivodina suffered from Hungarian oppression before the war,
to tell us exactly what such absorption would mean. These
annexations would not only have meant misery for the annexed
but would have brought enemy powers up to the hearthstone
of the Serbian people, who would have been as badly off as they
were in the middle of the nineteenth century. There remained
the solution of federation. But it is asking a great deal of a
sovereign to apply that to a region which has lent itself to
insurrection financed and organised by a hostile foreign power.

So the King dealt with Croatia by the light of his own
wisdom, which proved insufficient. He could not send an army
to deal with the unrest. It would have ruined the national
prestige to have admitted the existence of civil war, and indeed

SERBIA

629

the actual state of affairs was a good deal short of that. Many
people travelled through Croatia at this time without observing
any disruption, and the bulk of the population never ran any
physical risks whatsoever. So instead of soldiers the Government
sent Serbian or pro-Serb gendarmerie, who without any doubt
treated the Croats with hideous brutality. There were many
reasons for this. For one, they were sincere believers in the
Yugoslav idea, and thought that Slavs who wanted to desert
their brother Slavs and foregather with non-Slavs were very
wicked people, who would be the better for a beating. For
another, the Croats met them with a hostility that terrified them,
strangers as they were and far away from home, and they felt
justified in using any methods that would disarm their enemies.
It must be remembered that when they came to grips with the
terrorists financed by Italy they were dealing with men who
habitually practised mutilation and had been known to torture a
man for three days before they killed him. Since a Serbian
policeman in Croatia was faced with many different types of
Croat dissident and usually had no means of distinguishing
between them, it is not surprising that very often mild and
inoffensive Liberals were subjected to treatment that would have
been appropriate, and then only according to Mosaic law,
when applied to professional assassins and torturers. This
meant that a great many people, some of whom were en-
tirely innocent, were beaten and ill-treated in Croatian police
stations.

Yet another reason for the brutality of the police lay in the
difficulty of maintaining discipline in a police force, which is
always less easy to control than an army, since it works in
smaller and more scattered groups. No order could be issued
in Belgrade which would make it certain that Belgrade’s orders
were being obeyed in Croatia. There was also, as a disturbing
factor, the appalling police tradition which lingered in a form
that was bad enough in all territories which had once been
Hapsburg, and in a far worse form in all territories that had
been Turkish. The police were regarded as a body that had to
get results satisfactory to the supreme power in the State, and
that had better , not be questioned by lower powers on how it
got those results lest it took its revenge. This encouraged a
spirit of enterprise that was usually regrettable in its manifesta-
tions ; that was notably regrettable in Croatia when the police

VOL. I 2 S

630 BLACK LAMB AND GREY FALCON

themselves started murdering Croatian politicians whose removal
they thought likely to facilitate their tasks, and organised. bands
of gangsters called chetnitsi who went about assaulting Croat
patriots and breaking up their meetings as they themselves
could not do in uniform for fear of being reported to the highest
authorities.

It would be easy to exaggerate the extent of this situation.
Atrocities did not happen everywhere, or every day. It would
not be easy to exaggerate the degree to which Raditch and
Matchek, by the mindlessness and emotionalism of their leader-
ship and their failure to turn the political situation to their
advantage, were responsible for the suffering of their followers.
But it was a' detestable situation, and though the King did not
hear the whole truth about it, owing to the independence of the
police, he heard at least enough to make him realise that the
policy of suppression was a mistake, and that he must make
another attempt at a policy of reconciliation, since even if that
failed it would smell better than the other. But he was strangely
obstinate in his persistence. It has been suggested that there
was an international explanation for his obstinacy, and that
he had mistaken the personal affection felt for him by Sir
Nevile Henderson, then British Minister in Belgrade, for
approval of his political actions. According to this story he
made the pathetic error of believing that his dictatorship won
him favour in English eyes and was worth maintaining if for
that reason alone.

Every independent mind in Croatia was now anti-Serb, and
had been thrown into the arms of the foreign terrorists. In
September 1931 the King had had the unhappy idea of pro-
claiming a new constitution which virtually annulled the
principle of popular representation. A Senate was established
with eighty-seven members, no less than forty-one of whom were
to be nominated by the King. Ministers were responsible to
the King and not to Parliament, and were to be nominated by
the King. The ballot was no longer secret and voluntary, but
open and obligatory. With a free Parliament thus abolished,
and freedom of speech and freedom of the press long ago
become mere memories, the Croats had to take what means they
could to defend themselves by secret arming and appeals to
foreign opinion. This was precisely what Mussolini had de-
signed, yet the King showed no signs of retractation.

SERBIA

631

He had lost the Croats, and he had not kept the Serbs The
new constitution struck the Serbians as an act horrible in itself,
since democracy is as essential a part of their social structure as
Christianity or agriculture, and doubly horrible because it had
been perpetrated by a Karageorgevitch. A man who worked
for many years with the King on a scheme for developing the
education of the recovered territories, and who greatly loved him,
told me that when he went to see him at the palace during this
time, he could hardly speak to him. “ My voice kept on break-
ing, I could do nothing but stare at him, as if I were asking
him, ' Is it really you who have done this thing ? ’ And though
he must have noticed my distress and was, I think, quite fond
of me, he said nothing about it, but went on talking, pleasantly
and calmly, like a teacher who has upset a child by doing
something which it cannot understand and which she cannot
yet explain to it." It is possible that there was an explanation.
The King told certain people that he intended to give his
country a constitution which would actually be more democratic
than any previous one, as soon as circumstances convinced him
that this step could be taken in safety, and he seems to have
spoken as if he meant what he said. Though there are no grounds
for supposing him to be a lover of democracy for its own sake,
there are none for supposing him to have hated it. What seem
political principles in a country which has established its right
to existence may seem expedients in a country where the
nationalist issue has not yet been settled. The King may have
believed that democracy had its value as a national and dynastic
tradition, and might well be restored when he had gathered the
results of his foreign policy, and had built so strong a wall of
peace on his threatened frontiers that he could afford a measure
of internal conflict.

For the King was far more successful in settling his affairs
abroad than at home. In the international sphere his naivete
did not betray him but inspired him. It sent him forward to
offer his hand to ancient enemies, whose surprise disarmed
them, so that they found the friendliness in them awakening
and answering. He laid the foundations of a most necessary
structure that might have subserved the peace not only of his
people but of all Europe when he repudiated the hostility
between Bulgaria and Yugoslavia that had been encouraged
by Russia and envenomed by King Ferdinand. Here he was

63S black lamb AND GREY FALCON

helped by the recent decline in the fortunes of I.M.R.O. This
body had virtually lost its cause in Macedonia, because the
Yugoslavian administration was rapidly improving, and the
Yugoslav Macedonians, who are no fools, saw that they might
live far from disagreeably if only they were not harried by
perpetual guerilla attacks and forced to pay extortionate illegal
taxes. This is not to say that the Bulgarians in Yugoslav
Macedonia gave up their desire that the territory in which
they lived should be handed over to Bulgaria. Many have
never been reconciled to Yugoslav rule. But most of them grew
heartily sick of I.M.R.O., and joined their Serb neighbours in
picking up rifles whenever a raiding party appeared and giving
as good as they got.

I.M.R.O., thus repulsed, then turned its whole attention to
its work in Bulgaria, where it had for long fulfilled the functions
of a Fascist Party, and strengthened that party till it was a state
within the State. Its financial resources were enormous, for it
had foreign aid and levied illegal taxes on Bulgarian Macedonia
as in Yugoslavian Macedonia ; from the tobacco industry alone
it raised over a million pounds in six years. But its chief
resource was its ruthlessness, which, as time went on, made
Bulgarian political life into a shambles. Sofia, which is a city
full of delightful people, beautiful and extravagantly literate,
lay in the power of a savage gang as if enslaved by sorcerers,
and stared glassily at the assassinations that occurred nearly
every day in the open streets. The whole of life was infected
with fear and squalor. No shops could open without paying a
tax to I.M.R.O., and all had to supply its followers with goods
on the production of an ofHcial requisition. Every hotel-keeper
had to reserve five rooms for I.M.R.O., two on the first floor
for the leaders, three on higher levels for the rank and file. An
ancient heroism took on itself the likeness of A1 Capone. King
Boris of Bulgaria, and indeed most Bulgarians, were deeply
ashamed. Because I.M.R.O. had no hold on its followers other
than its claim to liberate Yugoslavian •Macedonia, King Boris
decided to spike the movement's guns by declaring a new and
unalterable policy of friendship with Yugoslavia. Henceforward
the parasite state would have to fight its host to keep its life.
The plundered peasants and shopkeepers, to say nothing of the
tobacco industry, were deeply sensible of the conveniences
offered by the friendship, even though they may have felt no

SERBIA

633

sentimental attachment for Yugoslavia whatsoever. The
leaders of I.M.R.O. were executed, imprisoned or driven to
flight, while their followers were beaten and disbanded ; and
Bulgaria turned towards a more normal way of life.

This reconciliation would not have been possible without
King Alexander's eager acceptance of King Boris’s advances.
He did much to sweeten Bulgarian feeling by his visits to Sofia
and Varna, which, indeed, were among the most fearless acts
recorded of any sovereign. All the Balkan peoples like a man
with courage. And when King Boris delayed to give proper
diplomatic expression to the new friendship, owing to the in-
fluence of Italy on some Bulgarian politicians and the tropism
of lifelong hatreds in others. King Alexander paid other visits
that were designed to hurry him up. It was his aim to keep
Italy at bay by uniting his neighbour states into a bloc resolved
to keep the South-East of Europe inviolate. He went to Con-
stantinople to see Mustapha Kemal, who smiled at him with
eyes which revealed that the Balkans had once more played
their trick on the Turk, and had been conquered only to rule ;
for those eyes were blue, and the Ataturk, like some sultans,
several viziers, and the flower of the Janissaries, was at least
half Slav. He went to Greece, and set going negotiations that
were ultimately consummated, in spite of the peculiarly un-
concordant character of Greek politicians. Greece, Turkey and
Yugoslavia signed the Balkan Pact in 1933, and once Bulgaria
found herself one against three she changed her mind and joined
them in 1934.

But even these achievements cannot have convinced King
Alexander that the world was as pleasant as he had believed
it to be twenty years before when he was a young man, at the
end of the Balkan War : as pleasant as it must be if it is worth
while lavishing on it the luxury of poetry, of such dreams as the
vision of the Frushka Gora. It was not only that the path of
his successes must inevitably lead him to a pact with Soviet
Russia. That Mustapha Kemal had told him ; and he could see
that the support of Russia, no matter whether it was White or
Red, was absolutely necessary to the Balkans if they were to
make a stand against Western aggression. But there were
more disagreeable aspects of his situation than that, which
must have struck him at the very beginning of his diplomatic
pilgrimage and made him conscious that certain glories had

634 BLACK LAMB AND GREY FALCON

left the world, that nothing was now simple in shape and bright
like a sword.

His very first meeting with the King of Bulgaria showed a
certain dimming of the monarchic tradition, a certain muting
of martial music as it had been heard through history. It
happened that in 1930 King Boris had married Princess Gio-
vanna of Italy, who was cousin to King Alexander, as their
mothers had been sister princesses of Montenegro. The first
meeting of the kings had to take place timidly, under the
shelter of this cousinly relationship. It was represented that,
on a return journey to Sofia from Paris and London, Queen
Giovanna was overcome by her sense that blood was thicker
than water, and felt that she must see King Alexander, whom
in fact she cannot possibly have laid eyes upon since 1913 when
he was twenty-five and she was six. In response King Alexander
came down to the railway station and drank coffee with them
in a waiting-room, specially decorated in the gloomy fashion
habitual on such occasions, during the hour’s halt the Orient
Express always made at Belgrade. There had been some
dealings between the two countries, but King Boris had not
dared to make the more definite overtures which would have
justified King Alexander in proposing a visit to the palace.
But once they were all standing on the platform Queen Giovanna
forced the diplomatic pace by kissing King Alexander as if she
really meant it, putting her arms on his shoulders as if there
were a strong good-will between them all which might do great
things for them if they let it. King Alexander was stirred out
of his usual formality into responsiveness, and in the waiting-
room they talked and laughed together with the warmth of real
loyalty. But there was defiance in their laughter. This meeting
sprang from the revolt of one of the Italian Royal Family
against Mussolini. Three heirs to the blood of kings were
conspiring, not without trepidation, to give the people peace in
spite of a blacksmith’s son.

Such a spectacle could not have been imagined by the
priests and emperors of Byzantium, nor by the Nemanyan
kings, nor even by the Serbian peasants who raised Karageorge
and Milosh Obrenovitch to be princes over them. Surely, they
would have said, a king must be all-powerful ; others might
snatch his sceptre, but so long as he held it power was his.
And surely, they and their subjects would have agreed, the

SERBIA

63s

people would never give birth to its own enemy. But now there
was a new factor to confound all their certainties. There were
two sorts of people. There was the people as it had been since
the beginning of time, that worked in the villages, small towns,
and capitals. But there was also a new people, begotten by the
new towns which the industrial and financial developments of
the nineteenth century had raised all over Europe : towns so
vast and intricate that, in coping with the problems of their
own organisation, they lost all relationship to the country round
them, so that even though they were called capitals they were
not, for a head should have some connection with its body :
towns planned in the biological interest of only the rich, and
careless of the souls and bodies of the poor. The new sort of
people had been defrauded of their racial tradition, they enjoyed
no inheritance of wisdom ; brought up without gardens, to
work on machines, all but a few lacked the education which
is given by craftsmanship ; and they needed this wisdom and
this education as never before, because they were living in con-
ditions of unprecedented frustration and insecurity. A man
without tradition and craft is lost, and book learning is of little
help to him, for he lacks the shrewdness to winnow what he reads.

Some among this new people, by a miracle that may be
called grace, resist all these assaults on their stock, and are as
the best of the old people. But there are those who succumb,
never ripen and are infantile, and so react to their frustration
and necessity, as infants react to hunger, by screaming and
beating out at what is nearest. One such, named Luccheni,
had killed Elizabeth of Austria in 1898. But his kind had
grown in power since then. This is not to say that they had
become wiser, or had discovered a formula that would medicine
their distress ; it was only that there were more of them, and
that, conscious of their numbers, they had learned to scream
orders as well as complaints. So when King Alexander, having
achieved the Balkan entente, visited France to discuss the new
power’s future relationship, he was struck down at Marseilles
not by a hungry vagrant, but by a ruler who was in a position
to tyrannise over the royal blood of his country as he had
tyrannised over its peasants and workmen. A form of govern-
ment had arisen which was by far more disgusting than any of
the governments of the immediate past, though they had been
nasty enough. The great powers had perpetuated Balkan

6j6 BLACK LAMB AND GREY FALCON

misery by the Treaty of Berlin. They had been responsible for
many ugly deaths in high places — Prince Michael of Serbia
had been killed by Austrian conspiracy, Queen Draga and King
Alexander Obrenovitch might have lived to old age had it not
been for Austrian intrigue, Franz Ferdinand and Sophie Chotek
were doomed by Austrian maladministration. They had been
responsible for many ugly births in low places : Luccheni and
Mussolini would never have come to be in a just economic
system. But at least they knew when they had sinned that
there was sin, at least they were aware that there was good and
there was evil. But this the new rulers of the world did not
Know. " Violence,” said Mussolini in the unmistakable accents
of moral imbecility, “ is profoundly moral, more moral than
compromises and transactions.” Time had rolled backward.
It seemed likely that man was to lose his knowledge that it is
wiser being good than bad, it is safer being meek than fierce,
it is fitter being sane than mad. He was not only ignoring the
Sermon on the Mount, he was forgetting what the Psalmist had
known. And since these things are true it was certain that,
once man had forgotten them, he would be obliged, with pains
that must be immense, to rediscover them.

Belgrade knows all this, and looks forward to her future with
apprehension. For to tell the truth, it is a mournful city. Even
in spring, when the young lovers walk among the flowers, in
Kalemegdan, and their elders sit in the restaurants talking
politics with a new and rosy vehemence, because their nostrils
are filled with the savour of roasting lamb and piglet, its under-
lying mood is an autumnal doubtfulness. The winter is going
to be very long and hard. Is it going to be worth while living
through it for the sake of what lies beyond ? And those who
wonder are not ignorant of what winter is, nor are they cowards.
This mood is one of the deep traces left on the capital by Alexander
Karageorgevitch’s personality. It is still his city. If one of the
medieval Serbians who painted the frescoes in the monasteries
came to life and covered a wail with Belgrade, he would cer-
tainly show the murdered king floating on his bier above the
city : and if the picture were to be a valid symbol it would show
the King’s tenacious and reserved face changed by doubtful-
ness, its reserve breaking to betray a doubt whether its tenacity
had been of any avail.

Each Serbian ruler has proved something by his reign.

SERBIA

637

More than once it was proved by this curious sovereignty, newer
than the United States and as old as Byzantium, that a small
state could defeat a vast empire ; always it was proved that it is
terrible, even in victory, to be a small state among great empires.
It was given to Alexander to give new proof of these arguments,
and to prove others also. By the expansion of his state beyond
the limits of his people’s culture, Serbia had been forced into
guilt. It was, evidently, a moral necessity that small peoples
should form small states, and the price exacted for the defence
of morality looked to be more than men’s bodies can afford to
pay. This the King had known well as he drove stiffly through
the streets of Belgrade. A dictator himself, he was the first
ruler in Europe to learn how inimical dictatorship must be to all
true order. He knows it still better as he floats over the city on
his bier. For his murder went virtually unpunished. France
hardly dared to try his assassins, and the League of Nations
murmured timid words of censure, such as would offend no one.

Belgrade IX

We grew eager to leave Belgrade, and start on the trip we
were to take with Constantine through Macedonia and Old
Serbia, though nothing unpleasant was happening to us here.
There were indeed two disconcerting moments when we turned
a corner too smartly and came on Constantine and Gerda in
complete emotional disarray, Gerda weeping in disregard of the
passers’ frank Slav stares, Constantine red with misery. But
we had taken it for granted that Constantine’s life would cover
the whole range of oddity, and would be painfully odd as well
as pleasantly odd, so we were hardly even surprised. It was
no personal experience that depressed us in the city, but the
pervading air of anti-climax. Nothing real had happened here
since King Alexander died. That was indeed more of a miracle
than an anti-climax. His murderers had put him out of the
way in order that the country should be left without a head and
would be unable to defend itself when it was attacked, yet the
attack was never made.

This inaction is still mysterious, though there are one or two
obvious factors which must have recommended it. The first
was the reaction of Yugoslavia to the King’s death. It was not

638 BLACK LAMB AND GREY FALCON

split asunder, but on the contrary drew closer in a unity it had
not known since King Peter's abdication. Every part of the
country, even Croatia, abandoned itself to grief. No state not
fallen into animal sloth can lose its head, whether that be king
or president, without some amount of visceral anguish, and the
Slavs, being analytical, knew that though Alexander had com-
mitted many harsh and foolish acts he had been fundamentally
the priest of his people. There are not only good men and bad
men, there are bad good men and there are good bad men.
A bad good man complies in each individual act with accepted
ethical standards, but his whole life describes a pattern that
cannot be pleasing to God. A good bad man may commit all
manner of faults and crimes, but at bottom he lets nothing come
before the duty of subjecting experience to the highest law ;
and the Yugoslavs knew that King Alexander belonged to this
order. They were aware that though he had sent too many
of them to prison, he had sought to give Yugoslavia an honour-
able destiny that would preserve its genius. So there was no
revolt of the Croats, and the foreign royalties and statesmen who
followed the King’s bier through the streets of Belgrade were
amazed by the strange, soft sound of a whole city weeping.

The other factor that preserved Yugoslavia from the long-
planned assault was the secret attitude of the great powers,
which was more audacious than their public showing. Immedi-
ately after the assassination the British Mediterranean Fleet
took up its position in the Adriatic ; and it is possible that the
French found out more than they were meant to about the
crime, and that they were able to demand a quid pro quo for
erecting the scaffolding of obfuscation that surrounded the
trial of the murderers at Aix-en-Provence. That their policy
preserved peace at the moment does not exculpate it, for a war
then would have been far less dangerous than later ; and mean-
while every totalitarian ruffian in Europe rejoiced to see one of
their kind strike down a foreign king in peace-time and go scot-
free, and all honest men lost heart.

Here in Belgrade that shadow did not lift by an inch. For
all the vehemence and intelligence of life it was at a deadlock.
There were plenty of people daring to think, but no one acted,
except perhaps the group of financial and industrial adven-
turers who are supposed to be represented by Stoyadinovitch,
who " admire " capitalism, who are inspired by the myth that

SERBIA

639

the capitalism which is dying all over Europe will revive for
their benefit. Error often stimulates the organism more
violently than the truth, as cancer produces a more spectacular
reaction in its host than the healthy cell. Those who had
truer foundations to their thought were simply waiting for their
scepticism to be resolved. They used to draw their strength
from France and England and Russia. But they were so
deeply shocked by the failure of France and England to speak
honestly before the League of Nations concerning King Alex-
ander’s murder that they no longer thought of those two coun-
tries, they only wondered. They could not derive any refresh-
ment from us in the West till we should give them new proof of
our value. They still thought much of Russia but not as they
did when the Balkans were perpetually fecundated by Russian
mysticism or revolutionary theory, for Russia was by then so
remote behind its Chinese wall of exclusiveness and secretiveness,
it was like thinking of Paradise, or as it may seem to others,
of Hell.

Sometimes it seemed as if their inactivity was in part due to the
mythic quality of the popular imagination. It is as if the people
were saying to themselves, “ A state must have a head, but we
have none till our king is a man, so we. cannot live like a state,
we must hold our peace till young Peter can rule us ”. That
is a wise enough decision ; but where the popular mind holds
too firmly to its primitive entertainments, its first fairy-tales,
it strikes into folly. King Alexander left three Regents to rule
Yugoslavia till his son came to maturity : his cousin Prince
Paul, his doctor, and the Governor of Croatia (himself a Croat),
with a general in reserve. None of the non-royal Regents was
outstanding in character or influence, so if they wished to oppose
Prince Paul it would have been impossible. The country felt,
therefore, that Prince Paul exerted the only effective power under
the Regency ; and this was probably true. So far as strangers
could see, he had acquitted himself very creditably within the
limits set by his distaste for his position. For he had an exclusive
interest in art which is very odd in a pure Slav, and it is generally
known that he would far rather have led the life of a connoisseur
in Florence than be tied to a tedious administrative job in
almost pictureless Belgrade. Perhaps because of this desire to
be doing something else somewhere else, perhaps because of
the prudence which enabled him in the past to live calmly

640 BLACK LAMB AND ORBY FALCON

among the disturbed Karageorgevitches, he always responded
to the forces working in Yugoslavia rather than governed them.
He was amiable to Stoyadinovitch, and bowed and smiled to
all the powers that Stoyadinovitch led up to him, even to Italy
and Germany.

This was not at all a foolish policy for a man who knows him-
self not naturally a ruler, in an extravagantly perilous time of
history. But the myth-making mind of the people saw him as
the Regent of the fairy stories, the Uncle of the Babes in the
Wood, who longs to usurp his charge’s throne, who is in sym-
pathy with usurpers at their crassest, with Mussolini and
Hitler. There was ascribed to him a savage spirit of reaction,
fired from an anti-Bolshevism that regrets the Romanoffs and
is loyal to the Demidoffs. Yet it seems unlikely that a lover of
Western painting, whose law of life is obviously taste, should have
felt such passionate nostalgia for the Philistine court of Nicholas
II, and the circumstances of the separation between Arsenius
Karageorgevitch and Aurora Demidoff must have forbidden
the unity that a son might normally feel with his mother’s
family. From all appearances Prince Paul’s political ideas
are derived not from Russia but from the upper and middle
class England he learned to know when he was at Oxford.
This is not to say that they were ideally applicable to the Balkan
situation, but their inapplicability is of a different sort from
Tsarist obscurantism. There were no times when the Liberalism
of Belgrade failed to be inspiring, for it is a robust tree with
roots deep in the nature of the Slav race ; but there were times
when it seemed as if this Liberalism could never come into
effective action again, because it had broken from the peasant
tradition of sound sense and preferred those urban opinions
which are only clever guesses.

" But you will see that all must go well here," I said to my
husband, as I sat in front of my dressing-table in the hotel
bedroom, putting on my hat to go out to tea with Gerda and
Constantine, “ as soon as we get to Macedonia. You will see
that there is a Balkan genius so strong that its peoples can never
perish, that they can take refuge from material death, and even
intellectual or moral death, in its spiritual life.’’ “ That seems
so strange to me,” said my husband, “ when I have all my life
heard of Macedonia as a symbol of age-long misgovemment and
ruin. I used to hear of it when I was a child, as a place where

SERBIA

641

men butchered other men, whom they should have thought of
as their brothers." " But that was not age-long," I said. " I
remember that too. We heard our elders talking of the squalid
disputes in Macedonia when we were somewhere about nine
or ten, and I realise now that it was after the Murzsteg agree-
ment between Turkey and the great powers was signed in 1903.
That was a terrible business. It provided for the policing of
Macedonia by military forces sent out by the great powers, and
it was drawn up by the Austro-Hungarian and Russian Foreign
Ministers, Goluchowski and Lamsdorff, at one of Franz Josefs
hunting lodges. It happened that Goluchowski, who was a
clever man, loved shooting above all things, and that Lamsdorff,
who was a stupid man, loved writing above all things. So
Goluchowski went out with his gun every day and all day,
and left Lamsdorff to draft the agreement. Apparently he came
back too tired to read it, and apparently all the other diplomats
in Europe were equally fond of shooting, for they all passed an
imbecile clause by which it was announced that as soon as
Macedonia could be restored to order the Turkish administrative
districts were to be delimited anew so that they might correspond
with ethnographical districts. This automatically provoked
civil war of the bloodiest character. For this clause terrified the
Bulgars, Serbs and Greeks in Macedonia, who knew that there
are hardly any districts which are ethnographically pure in that
part of the world, and saw themselves handed over to whatever
race was in the majority, by however small a figure. Each
group therefore attacked both the others, and killed off as many
of them as possible, with the object of reducing them to un-
questionable minorities. This went on for three years, till an
Englishwoman called Lady Grogan visited Macedonia and
informed the Foreign Office of the reason for the massacres,
and the great powers drowsily collected themselves and with-
drew the clause. But, of course, there had been endless pain
and misery for five centuries before. It is astonishing that there
should be anything waiting for us in Macedonia, but last time
I was there I had the impression that there was more there than
anywhere else."

We started early for our tea-party, because we wanted to
visit the Prince Paul Museum and have a last look at the
pictures and antiquities with which the Regent had filled one
wing of the New Palace on the main street. Some he himself

643 BLACK LAMB AND GREY FALCON

had collected, others were the remains of a collection which
the Serbian State had gathered since 1842 but which was
pillaged and damaged in the war. There were a lovely gold vessel
found in Macedonia, relic of a pre-Mycenean civilisation not
recorded in history, some beautiful gold work and enamels from
Byzantium and medieval Serbia, some robes and furniture
and arms of the earlier Karageorgevitches and Obrenovitches ;
some bad paintings by the Germans and Austrians, some very
good paintings by the French and goodish paintings by the
English, and some Slav paintings that had little individuality
and were echoes of the German and Austrian and French work ;
and some Slav sculpture that had great individuality, but was
contorted with its struggle to lay hold of a sound tradition.
The serene certainty of the medieval work, and the uncertainty
of the modern work might have been distressing had we not
recognised some friends who were manifesting the continuity
of Serbian national life, which would doubtless make itself felt
in time. During our stay in Belgrade we had sometimes visited
a caf6 for wine and hot spiced sausages towards midnight, and
there had listened to the singing of two Roumanian sisters, fine
girls, plump as table birds, who had a habit of putting their
heads together and smiling widely, just as Phyllis and Zena
Dare used to be photographed in my childhood. The night
before, we had watched a young man, neatly dressed and con-
fident yet manifestly no townsman, probably the son of the
wealthiest peasant in some big village, fall under the charms of
both these sisters, with a perfect impartiality which struck us
as psychologically curious, but which was apparently accepted
by the two girls without resentment. We had no doubt that his
passion for them weis of a practical nature ; but here in the
museum we found the three, in front of some medieval ikons
and reliquaries, and the young man was explaining to the two
girls, with violent gestures and proud cries, that the first King
of the Nemanyas was the father of St. Simeon, who had founded
the monastery of Hilandar on Mount Athos. They appeared
to be interested and impressed.

When we came to Constantine’s house he opened the door
to us, a happy little Buddha, as he alwa)rs is when he is dis-
pensing hospitality, and Gerda waited for us behind her tea-
table, composed and gracious in a neat grey silk dress, with not
a trace of tears. The two children played about ^e table.

SERBIA

643

miraculous little creatures, since they reconciled and yet
obstinately maintained apart the different elements in them.
They can flash a glance which is at once German in its romantic
activism, Jewish in its shrewd and swift calculation of prob-
abilities and Slav in its analytic penetration. They have an
amusing coolness, of which I learned the very first time I ever
met Constantine. I was taken to call on him at his office in
connection with the work I was doing on my first visit to
Yugoslavia, so late in the morning that to finish our discussion
we had to lunch together. So Constantine telephoned to his
house and said, “ Is that you, my little son ? Tell your mother
that I will not be home to lunch because I have run away with
an Englishwoman." Sitting at the opposite side of the table, I
heard the child’s reply in the unknown language, cold as ice-
water. “ Do you think,” he asked, “ that the Englishwoman
has any stamps ? ” That was the older boy, but the younger
also had an air of being seriously aware of the necessity for
imposing form on the extravagances of nature ; and it could be
seen, now the whole family was united, that they regarded
Constantine and his mother as conduits of that extravagance.
They were sage about this opinion. They were willing to admit
that the prodigiousness of the pair was beneficent and entertain-
ing, but they would not blind themselves to its need for control.

I grieved a little at their attitude, knowing them wrong,
with an error that they had inherited from Gerda, with her
Western tradition. Constantine may need control, owing to his
circumstances, the most unfavourable of which is his surrender
to the West ; but Constantine’s mother has shown herself able
to endure so much that there can be no question of adapting
her better to life. In her youth her beauty, which must have
been superb, presented her with a gifted and loving husband,
her son Constantine, and a daughter. Just before the war the
scourge of the Balkans, tuberculosis, took the daughter. Then
her husband and son went to the war, and her husband died
of typhus, and her son was sent to Russia and disappeared.
Meantime her home was occupied by the Germans, she was
without means, and though she found work as a nurse that
ended with the war, she nearly starved till life became more
normal and she succeeded in getting pupils for music lessons ;
and even then she was in misery, for not until three years
after the peace did she hear that Constantine still lived. All

644 BLACK LAMB AND GREY FALCON

this might conceivably have been borne by a peasant woman,
disciplined from birth to silence under frustration. But this
woman was a musician, an interpretative artist, whose dis-
cipline was all directed towards the public demonstration of
what she felt. What might have been expected was that she
would feel a transcendent kind of grief and die of it, a special
death that would have been a fulfilment. But here she was, her
face certainly tortured, but not so much because of her sufferings
as because of the impossibility of finding out the exact truth
about humanity, which is to say, the impossibility of finding a
stable foundation for artistic endeavour.

“ Then you can tell me something I " she exclaimed, when
we told her that since we had last seen her we had been to
Canada. “Is it possible that Scriabin is really the favourite
musician of all Canadians ? ” We replied that nothing we had
seen of Montreal and Toronto had prepared us for this con-
clusion. “ For myself, I cannot really believe it,” ^he explained,
“ but there came to Belgrade this winter a Canadian professor,
and he assured me that in his country the favourite composer
of all was not Beethoven or Mozart or Wagner but Scriabin,
and that there existed a great society to popularise his works,
called the Scriabin Society. But it is not possible, for Scriabin
himself would have admitted that if he was anybody’s favourite
composer that person would not have been able to appreciate
him. A people which ate lobster and champagne at every meal
could never claim to be fins gourmets of lobster and champagne.
Also, Scriabin is too difficult." Her fingers stood up, stiffly
apart, each registering discomfiture before a technical problem.
" Not enough people could play him, not enough people could
listen to him, to become truly familiar with him. Besides how
absurd to think of a great country, largely covered with snow,
many of whose inhabitants earn their living trapping wild
animals, having Scriabin as its favourite composer.”

“ Yes, Mama,” said Constantine, “ but are you not for-
getting that Scriabin himself was the child of a great country
covered with snow, where there was a good deal of trapping wild
animals ? ” " Yes, yes,” said the old lady, “ but I do not believe
that in the whole of Russia you would find one man who would
claim that Scriabin was the favourite composer of Russians I ”
“ But, perhaps. Mama,” said Constantine, “ it is a different
sort of animal that they trap in Canada.” “ A different sort of

SERBIA 645

animal t But what would that matter ? ” exclaimed his mother
in stupefaction, knitting her fine mind against this puzzle till
she saw Constantine winking at us, and then she cried out,
laughing, “ Ah, wait till you are old, you will see what it is like
when everybody mocks you, even your poor little idiot son I ”
Very soon we had an idea that Gerda thought that this
was not the proper way to entertain us. She thought the less of
us for liking this wild talk about music, which could not really
be of any value, because it made no references to the Ideal or
the History of Music. It would have been better if we had
made statements about specific musical occasions and had evoked
them from her, and had thus established our common enjoy-
ment of culture : if we had, for example, spoken of hearing a
Beethoven Symphony in Toronto or Montreal, and had asked
her where she had heard it. She spoke presently of her sur-
roundings as lacking precisely that kind of sophistication, when
the conversation turned to food and the amount of cooking
that was done in Yugoslavian households. Contemptuously
she told us that when a Serbian family expected guests to tea,
the housewife would put herself about to bake cakes and
biscuits ; but, as we would see, she said with a shrug of the
shoulders, indicating the food on her table, which had been
obviously bought from a shop, she was not so. Her cool tone
drew a picture of how she would like to dispense hospitality.
One would go down, well dressed, with a full purse, and ail
one’s debts paid, to Kranzler if one lived in Berlin, to Dehmel
if one lived in Vienna, to Gerbeaud if one lived in Budapest,
and would greet the assistant, who would be very respectful
because of one’s credit, and would choose exquisite pastries
and petits fours, which would not only be delightful when
crushed against one’s friends’ palates, but would also be recog-
nisably from Kranzler, or from Dehmel, or from Gerbeaud.

She was assuming that my husband and I would share her
feeling, that we would be with her in upholding this cool,
powerful, unhurried ideal against the Serbian barbarians who
liked a woman to get hot over a stove, as if she could not afford
to pay other women to work for her, which indeed was probably
the case. It would have been difficult for us to explain how
wrong we thought her. We like the Apfelkuchen of Kranzler,
we have never gone to Vienna without buying the Nusstorte of
Dehmel, we have shamefully been late for a friend’s lunch in
VOL. I 2 T

646 BLACK LAMB AND GREY FALCON

Budapest for the reason that we had turned into Gerbeaud’s to
eat meringues filled with cream and strawberries. But we knew
that when one goes into a shop and buys a cake one gets nothing
but a cake, which may be very good, but is only a cake ; whereas
if one goes into the kitchen and makes a cake because some
people one respects and probably likes are coming to eat at
one’s table, one is striking a low note on a scale that is struck
higher up by Beethoven and Mozart. We believed it better to
create than to pay. In fact, England had had a bourgeoisie
long before Germany, and we had found out that the bourgeois
loses more than he gains by giving up the use of his own hands ;
but there is no wider gulf in the universe than yawns between
those on the hither and thither side of vital experience.

As Gerda spoke Constantine watched her with slightly
excessive approval, nodding and smiling. He so obviously
meant to reassure her and to recommend her to us that there
came back to us the spectacle they had twice presented to us
lately in the streets of Belgrade, dishevelled and disunited. It
was astonishing to think that between such scenes these people
should enjoy the glowing contentment with each other which now
warmed this room ; but of course there are millions of kinds
of happy marriages. Only when we rose to go and Constantine
told us that he would walk a little way back with us, did we
see that he was smiling not only at her but at us, and that his
smile bore the same relation to a real smile as false teeth do to
real teeth ; it performed the function of indicating good-will,
but the organism had failed in its normal spontaneous action.
I could feel him still smiling through the darkness, as we
strolled away from the cache of simple streets in which his
pretty little house found itself, into the boulevard where grey
concrete cakes of institutions and ministries shone with a
blindish brightness behind the electric standards. When we
came to the centre of the town, and looked across a circus where
people were hurrying in and out of the yellow-lit caffe, at the
slow and dark yet gay procession of the Corso, he said, still
with this undue facial cheerfulness, with the corners of his
mouth turned up, " I must go back now.” But he did not take
the hand my husband offered him, but stared across the street
at the Corso. Two gipsies, lean and dark as Sikhs, with red
rags tied round their heads, padded past, wheeling a handcart
in which there lay a bundle. It stirred, it sat up, it was an

SERBIA

647

elderly and beautiful woman in richly coloured garments who
looked at us with wild eyes that filled with solemn recognition,
who swept out her arm in the gesture of a prophet, and cried out
some words in Roumanian, which twanged with the spirit of
revelation. For a second it seemed a supreme calamity that we
could not understand her. But she softened, and fell back,
and was a bundle again ; she was simply drunk. Constantine
said absently, as if his soul were entirely with the march of
the Corso, “ You know, my wife has made up her mind to
come with us to Macedonia.”

I stood tramsfixed with horror. Tears began to run down my
cheeks. Macedonia was the most beautiful place that I had
ever seen in my life, I had looked forward to showing it to my
husband, and now we were to be accompanied by this disagree-
able woman who liked neither of us. It was like having to take
a censorious enemy on one’s honeymoon. Not only was this
proposal an outrage to a reasonable sentiment, it raised endless
practical difficulties. The cars and cabs we could rely on in
Macedonia would be small, too small for four, though comfort-
able enough for three. Gerda would have to be our guest, as
Constantine was to be, and the relationship between host and
guest is not easy for people who feel a strong mutual antipathy.
And her contempt for everything Slav and non-German would
be at its most peevish in Macedonia, which is the most Slav
part of Yugoslavia, and which is not only non-German but non-
Occidental, being strongly Byzantine and even Asiatic. " But
she will not like it ! " I exclaimed. ” So I have told her many,
many times I ” wailed Constantine. My husband bent down
over him, his spectacles shining with a light that looked mena-
cing, that was in fact panic-stricken. " Your wife cannot come
with us,” he said. " But she will, she will ! ” cried Constantine.
" All night she cries, because I will not take her, and I get no
sleep. And she says she will suicide herself if I go without her I
And I cannot let you go alone, for my Ministry wishes me to go
with you ! 1 tell you, she must come with us ! ” And he turned
and left us, walking very fast. My husband and I stood staring
at each other, feeling like the people in Kafka’s books who are
sentenced by an invisible and nameless authority for some
uimamed sin to a fantastic and ineluctable punishment. It
was not a thing that happens to one in adult life, being obliged
to go on a journey with someone whom one dislikes and who

648 BLACK LAMB AND GREY FALCON

has no sort of hold over one, sentimental or patriotic or economic.

So, at eight o'clock on the morning of Good Friday (accord-
ing to the Orthodox calendar) the four of us started for Mace-
donia from Belgrade station. My husband and I had driven
down from the hotel, past a comer of Kalemegdan Park that
drops a steep bank towards the river, claret-coloured with
tamarisk bloom. The early light lay as a happy presence on the
wide grey floods round the city, and it shone on the Obrenovitch
villa on the hill-top, which, like all Turkish villas, was ex-
quisitely appropriate to everything freshest in nature, to spring
and the morning. At the station we found that Gerda and
Constantine had not arrived, and we sat down at the caf^ on
the platform and ate beautiful Palestinian oranges, their flesh
gleaming like golden crystal. There appeared presently a
young doctor of philosophy, a colleague of Constantine’s, with
whom I had had some official business, who came to say good-
bye and bring me a bunch of red roses. He sat down with us
and had some coffee, and we talked until it became evident that
Constantine and Gerda were very late indeed, and we began to
walk up and down, alarmed and exasperated.

They came at the last possible moment, and we had to jump
into the train just as it went, the doctor of philosophy handing
up the roses to the window after we had started. My husband
and I busied ourselves packing away our baggage and putting
out cushions and books, for we were to be nearly twelve hours in
the train. But soon we became aware that Gerda was standing
quite still, looking down at the roses with a resentful expression,
and Constantine, with his arm round her, was attempting to
console her. “ Yes, it is very bad," he was saying, “ certainly
he should have brought you flowers also.” My husband and 1
stared at him aghast, for it was obvious that the young doctor
had come down to give me the roses as an impersonal and
official act, and that he had refrained from bringing any to
Gerda for the precise reason that she had some personal value
for him. " But I am afraid,” said Constantine, " that this
young man really does not know how to behave so well as I had
hoped, for look, these are not the flowers he should have given
our friend.” ” Nein, ganz gewiss nicht I ” agreed Gerda hotly,
and they gazed down at the roses, shaking their heads.

” Tell me,” said Constantine, turning to my husband,
” what sort of flowers would it be considered right in your

SERBIA

A49

country for a man to give to a lady whom he does not know
very well when he sees her off at a station ? ” My husband
guffawed and said, “ In our country he would go to a florist
and ask for some nice dowers.” Gerda looked disgusted, sat
down, and stared out of the window. Constantine said in
shocked and bewildered accents, “ O ! il y a des regies ! ”
“ What are they ? ” asked my husband, laughing coarsely.
From Constantine’s explanations I learned that it was not by
ill luck that I had been dogged through Central Europe by
carnations, which I detest ; I had brought them on myself by
my marriage to a banker. Pains had been taken, which I had
never perceived, to keep me from getting above myself, for it
was ruled that the flowers which I received on my arrival in a
town, and during my stay in it, should be modest. “ It is only
on departure,” said Constantine, “ that the bouquet should be
really large. And there remains the question of colour, which
is what disturbs us at this moment. There are certain colours,
particularly in roses, which are purely personal, which are not
suitable for gifts of ceremony. It is here that our young friend
has offended. These roses are nearly crimson.” My husband
turned to me with an air of suspicion, but Constantine did not
laugh. There was doubt in his eyes, as if he were wondering
whether his wife were not right, and he had greatly exaggerated
the degree of our refinement.

The lovely Serbian country, here like a fusion of Lowland
Scotland and New England, with many willows rising golden
green, and meadows white with daisies, and nymphean woods,
ran past us for some hours. Then there was the call for lunch,
and we went along to the restaurant car, to eat one of those
pungent and homely meals that are served on the Balkan trains.
As we sat down, a middle-aged man in a grey lounge suit stood
up in his place and shouted at an elderly man in a braided purple
peasant costume who went on with his meal. “ It is nothing,”
said the waiter who was taking our order ; “ they are only two
members of Parliament.” " Yes,” said Constantine, “ the one
in peasant costume is a well-known supporter of Mr. Stoyadino-
vitch, and the other is an Opposition man.” At this point the
Opposition man bent down to look at his opponent’s plate,
straightened himself, and cried, *' I see you are eating an
enormous amount of fish. No wonder you take no interest in
measures for controlling the floods, I suppose you like floods

650 BLACK LAMB AND GREY FALCON

because they briiig us quantities of fish.” He then sat down,
but sprang up immediately to shout, “ If you don’t make better
roads we in our banovina will become separatists. We've got
a fine regiment, and one will be enough, for only the riff-raff
of the Army would march for your lot.” That was the end,
and we all went on with our meal.

As we went back along the corridor a man ran out of his
carriage and grasped Constantine by both hands. ” Look at
him well,” said Constantine, ” he is a typical old Serbian
patriotic man.” He was short and thickset, overweight but
nimble, with a great deal of coarse black hair on his head and
face. " See, he has not a grey hair on his head,” Constantine
went on, " and he is nearly an old man. I will get him to come
and sit with us, for he likes me very much, and you can observe
him." He remained with us for quite a time, bouncing up and
down on his seat, as he passionately attacked the Stoyadino-
vitch Government, not for its reaction, but for its innovations.
“ The country has gone to the dogs,” he cried, " now that
there are so many non-Serbs in the Army ! Think of it, there
are Croat colonels. A Croat colonel, that is something ridiculous
to think of, like a woman preacher ! I tell you, the Croats are
spoiled for ever by the Austrian influence, they are like fallen
women, they cannot be raised.” Every now and then he stopped
to show my husband and myself some point in the landscape,
which he thought strangers should not miss. " They look good
people," he said of us ; but sighed and added gloomily, " But
after all they are from the West, they’re Europeans, no doubt
that they are in sympathy with this horrible age where every-
thing is questioned."

" Of course he is not at home in the present," Constantine
explained to us, " he is one of our medieval heroes reborn."
Though he was very rich and he had much to see to in his own
district, all his youth he used to rush backwards and forwards
between his home and Macedonia, where he was a comitadji
and killed many Turks. He fought like a lion in the Balkan
wars and the Great War, and after the peace he was made Ban
of South Serbia (which is the administrative title of Macedonia)
as a reward. " But," said Constantine, “ his ideas were not
modem enough for his position. He was splendidly brave, of
course, and that was a great qualification, for there could not
have been a more dangerous job, what with the I.M.R.O. and

SERBIA

651 ■

the wild Montenegrins and the Albanians. But in other ways
he was too siniple and too large, too Homeric. He wished to
remake Macedonia as it had been five hundred years ago, and
whenever he saw a ruined church or a castle that had belong^
to the Serbs and had been destroyed by the Turks, he would
take Turks and Moslem Albanians away from where they lived
until he had enough labour to rebuild them, and then he made
them work under armed guards. And when people said, * But
you must not do that,’ he answered, ‘ But why not ? They
knocked them down, didn’t they ? ’

“ But King Alexander was very kind about it, and though
he did not keep him there for long, since these things will now
not do, he gave him other work that he could do better. And
now this man is very happy building many churches, since he
is very pious, and the Church and the State to him are one.
He aims to make more foundations than our medieval King
Milutin, who built thirty-seven monasteries.” He bent across
and asked the patriot what his record was, and the old man
stroked his coal-black moustache with a flourish, and announced,
" Forty-six.” “ The one he loves most,” said Constantine, ” is
a chapel near the field of Kossovo, where he has really let him-
self go. It cost two hundred pounds, and it is ornamented with
frescoes, which gratify him in an old quarrel he has with the
Church, You see, our medieval kings, the Nemanyas, were
recognised as saints, except for the one who was a flagrant
sinner and defied the Church, who was that same Milutin who
built the thirty-seven monasteries. They were saints because
they were heads of a theocratic society on the Byzantine model,
and because they defended Christianity against the pagan
Turks. So he cannot see why Karageorge and the Karageorge-
vitches, who also united the Church and State and who actually
drove out the Turks, should not be recognised as saints too.
But of course the Church of to-day will have nothing to do with
such an idea, they think it is profane, and they tell him not to
be so impious. However, down there his chapel is far away
from everywhere, so he has had frescoes painted showing Kara-
george himself, and Alexander Karageorgevitch and old King
Peter, yes, and King Alexander, all with immense haloes like
golden soup-plates. He had quite a well-known artist to paint
them, and he knew it was wrong and did not want to do it, but
this one roared at him like a bull, and snatched so at his belt

652 BLACK LAMB AND GREY FALCON

as if he were finding his pistol, and the artist said, ‘ Oh, cer-
tainly they shall be saints, they shall all be saints ! ’ Then
when the Patriarch came down to consecrate the chapel this
one covered all the frescoes that showed the new royal saints
with banners, and all went well. But his mother, who is very
divote, she spends many hours lying on the floors of chapels
praying these sins of his will be forgiven.”

“Now tell your friends that we are coming to the heart of
Serbia," the patriot bade Constantine. " This town we are
coming into is Kraguyevats,” Constantine explained, “ and
it was the big town of the Shumadiya, that is to say the wooded
district, where the most Serbian Serbs came from, the ones that
were foremost in the revolt against the Turks. Now there are
great munition works here.” " Tell them to look over there at
the memorial to King Alexander,” said the patriot ; " it is a
good thing for foreigners to see, it makes him quite stout and
broad as a king should be, though God knows the poor man
was thin as a student. But now make them look out of the other
window, for God’s sake." “ Why ? ” asked Constantine. “ If
they do that they won't see the memorial to the Serbian dead.”
“ That’s just what I am hoping,” said the patriot. " But why ? ”
asked Constantine again. “ The figure of the Serbian mother
is considered very fine.” " It’s just that figure I don’t want them
to see,” insisted the other. “ Serbian women have got good
breasts, this creature they have put up looks like a toothpick.”
“ Never would he think of a woman’s breasts except from a
patriotic point of view,” explained Constantine. “ His eountry
is all to him. He is as pure as a good monk.”

A little further on he got out at his own station. A peasant
in a sheepskin jacket, a much younger man, was waiting for
him and took his baggage, and watched him as he said good-bye
to us, with a loving and loyal and condescending smile. " I am
glad to be back I ” cried the patriot. “ This is a beautiful part
of the country, you know I Some day you must all come and
see me I ” He smiled up at his local sky, and looked into the
branches of one of the lindens that grew all along the platform,
and was convulsed with pride. “ These lindens ! Fine, aren’t
they ? I planted them all ten years ago ! ” “ Ten ? It is not
possible ! ” exclaimed Constantine. " You must mean twenty 1 ”
“ No, I mean ten,” said the patriot, and turned to his servant.
" It is not more than ten years since I planted these trees, is it,

SERBIA

6S3

Sasha ? " “ It is twenty-two,” said Sasha. “ Sasha, you are a
fool and the son of a fool I ” cried the patriot. ” It is twenty-
two years since you planted these trees I ” the peasant answered,
his voice rising. " How can that be so,” the patriot screamed,
“when ” The train moved on and we re-established our-

selves for another long session. “ Would you not like to sit in
this corner ? " I asked Gerda. “ I think you will see most from
the window on this side.” “ That would be interesting, no
doubt,” said Gerda, " if one had the slightest intention of look-
ing out of the window.” The train ran on into the afternoon,
into the evening, into the night, into Macedonia.

END OF VOL. I

PRINTED BY R. & R. CLARK,

LIMITED, EDINBURGH

Internet Archive Audio

Featured

Top

Images

Featured

Top

Software

Featured

Top

Texts

Featured

Top

Video

Featured

Top

Mobile Apps

Browser Extensions

Archive-It Subscription

Save Page Now

Full text of "Black Lamb And Grey Falcon Vol-i"

See other formats